INDY Week 11 18 15 issue

raleigh•cary 11|18|15

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INDIES

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2015

INDYweek.com

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NOVEMBER 18, 2015

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2015

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RALEIGH

INSIDE NEWS & COLUMNS 8 27

NEWS: Issues with a missing landlord

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MUSIC CALENDAR

FOOD: A new documentary gives a chef’s

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ARTS CALENDAR

son new insight into his famous chef father

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FILM CALENDAR

12

The INDY’s Act Now and Food/Farmers Markets calendars can be found at indyweek.com.

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COMEDY PREVIEW: The Daily Show

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Paying up

Build Raleigh Better

Indies Arts Awards

Picture me wailin’ Wailin Storms talks influences and Nirvana—plus a review of the band’s great new LP

co-creator Lizz Winstead at Cat’s Cradle

ON THE COVER: Indies Arts Awards winners Chris Tonelli and Greg Lowenhagen PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

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Celebrating the engineers of the Triangle’s arts and culture scenes

Rawlings and Gillian Welch

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NOVEMBER 18, 2015

By Bob Geary

MUSIC ESSAY: An appreciation of Dave FILM REVIEW: Room, a harrowing tale of captivity, escape and a mother’s love

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A famed architecture critic talks how to make cities, particularly ours, look more interesting

MUSIC REVIEW: Talib Kweli and 9th

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INDYweek.com

One former worker wants a troubled nonprofit to give him his money By Jane Porter

Wonder team up for Indie 500 26

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EAT THIS: The delicious, strange

combination of Farmer’s Daughter’s collard kraut 25

WHERE WE’LL BE: The best arts and

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A R T S , C U LT U R E , F O O D & M U S I C

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F E AT U R E S

culture events of the week

PHOTO JOURNAL: In a Durham alley

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VOLUME 32 NUMBER 46

CALENDARS & EVENTS 31

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By Corbie Hill

Wailin Storms. From bottom are Mark Oates, Justin Storms, Steve Stanczyk and Todd Warner. See page 23.

PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

The INDY’S GUIDE to ALL THINGS TRIANGLE

Seeking Duke cardiology patients to participate in an 8-week study on medication compliance using digital tools to track progress.

You may be eligible for this research study if you: • are over 18 years old • have a personal iOS or Android device • are currently prescribed and taking heart medication, one or two times per day Participation includes: • Coming to our office to enroll in the study and take a survey • Taking part in brief surveys daily and weekly during the study on your mobile device for 6 weeks • Coming back to our office to take one final survey and complete the study You will be compensated for your study participation.

To sign up, email BEresearch@duke.edu or call 919-681-9521 Protocol # Pro00064774

INDYweek.com

back talk

Raleigh Cary Durham Chapel Hill

Pointless crap

The bizarre urge to control something that is not a problem is a uniquely human attribute (“You can fight City Hall,” Nov. 11). One of our worst. It is prominently displayed here in this “controversy.”

There are real problems our elected representatives should address, but they don’t. They do this kind of pointless crap.

I’m disgusted.

Don’t get me started on the paid parking.

That is what literally created the vibrant scene in Raleigh, free parking garages in the evenings. That’s why places like Chapel Hill and Durham are way behind Raleigh in every manner of entertainment.

Remo, via indyweek.com

Growing up

So as no surprise to everyone but Zach Medford and the Koch Bros, the Raleigh City Council did as promised: Three months later, it took a look at how the sidewalk ordinance worked, then made changes (“You can fight City Hall”). And will continue to do that. Cheers!

Neither #drunkguy nor prohibition, just a city growing up. inspired, via indyweek.com

The whole point

I was an owner of Weaver Street Market for about 20 years before moving to Durham, and I joined the Durham Co-Op over a year ago (“Disappointed, frankly,” Nov. 11) before they opened their doors. Of course there are sometimes tensions between the interests of the consumer-owners and the worker-owners at WSM—that’s exactly why the workers need to be assured of their own representation on the board!

Ruby Sinreich, via indyweek.com

Vanity project

What’s the point of [the Durham Co-Op Market] if they’re not providing a living wage to all employees (“Disappointed, frankly”)? The prices are higher than Whole Foods, and now they’re trying to strip away workers’ seat at the table. Why should I shop there? Is this just a vanity project for wealthy (white) people?

Vuncannon, via indyweek.com

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A ZM INDY, INC. COMPANY PUBLISHER Susan Harper raleigh•cary

EDITORIAL

11|11|15

N W O T K DRUNWINS!*

EDITOR IN CHIEF Jeffrey C. Billman MANAGING+MUSIC EDITOR

Grayson Haver Currin

ARTS & CULTURE EDITOR Brian Howe STAFF WRITERS

IONS. . 8 TRICT E? P G RES ’S FUTUR IN K WN RIN OFF D WNTO ACKS OR DO ITY B EAN F THE C S THAT M OE HAT D

Billy Ball, Jane Porter

CALENDAR EDITOR Allison Hussey COPY EDITOR David Klein STAFF PHOTOGRAPHERS

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*maybe

Alex Boerner, Jeremy M. Lange OPINION Bob Geary THEATER AND DANCE COLUMNIST Byron Woods VISUAL ART COLUMNIST Chris Vitiello CHIEF CONTRIBUTORS

Cheap shot

Very wrong of you to use David Cook as an example and label him a half-star (“Obscure idols,” Nov. 11). This is an offhanded write-up. Saying his voice is a bit raspier just shows that you have not actually listened to his music. If you had listened, you would have noticed, for instance, on the song “Better Than Me” how versatile and accomplished his voice is.

David Cook is a successful independent artist in his own right. He is currently on the Digital Vein tour performing to sold out shows. You are trying to reduce him to just another American Idol.

This article gives the impression that you just threw it together without knowing the complete facts. This is a cheap shot at David, pure and simple, in the hope you might gain some attention. Kind of has a TMZ feel to it.

Lose the drawing, it’s hideous.

Lady V, via indyweek.com

Happy guy, happy fans

You’re right that current radio is a problem for musicians who don’t fit neatly into country or pop or hip-hop (“Obscure idols”). But, Cook’s fans are way, way past the whole Idol thing now, and so is he. He’s got homes in Nashville and Kansas City, a top-notch home studio, a lovely new wife, a terrific new album, wonderful connections in the songwriting community of Nashville, and a career making music (which he loves, as you quoted above). It could get big for him again—just one movie theme song from that—or not. Either way, happy guy, happy fans.

NEMO, via indyweek.com

Spencer Griffith, Corbie Hill, David Klein, Jordan Lawrence, Craig D. Lindsey, Jill Warren Lucas, Glenn McDonald, Neil Morris, Sylvia Pfeiffenberger, Bryan C. Reed, V. Cullum Rogers, David A. Ross, Dan Schram, Zack Smith, Eric Tullis

ART+DESIGN

PRODUCTION MANAGER Skillet Gilmore ART DIRECTOR Maxine Mills GRAPHIC DESIGNER Christopher Williams

OPERATIONS

BUSINESS MANAGER Alex Rogers WEB CONTENT MANAGER Reed Benjamin OFFICE MANAGER William Kumpf

CIRCULATION

CIRCULATION MANAGER Brenna Berry-Stewart DISTRIBUTION: Joseph Lizana, Anne Roux,

Richard David Lee, James Maness, Laura Bass, Jeff Prince, JC Lacroix, Gloria McNair, David Cameron, Chris Taylor, Timm Shaw, Freddie Simons

ADVERTISING

ADVERTISING DIRECTOR Ruth Gierisch SENIOR ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE Dara Shain ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES

Kellie Allen, Ele Roberts, Sarah Schmader CLASSIFIEDS SALES MANAGER Leslie Land P.O. Box 1772 • Durham, N.C. 27702 201 W. Main St., Suite 101 • Durham, N.C. 27701 919-286-1972 709 W. Jones St. • Raleigh, N.C. 27605 • 919-832-8774 Email addresses: first initial[no space]last name@indyweek.com

WWW.INDYWEEK.COM DISPLAY ADVERTISING SALES RALEIGH 919-832-8774 DURHAM 919-286-1972 CLASSIFIEDS ADVERTISING 919-286-6642 CONTENTS COPYRIGHT 2015 INDY WEEK

All rights reserved. Material may not be reproduced without permission.

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DIRTY LAUNDRY Randy Light, aka drag-bingo queen Mary K Mart, wants his money.

The troubled nonprofit that owes him wants him to be patient— and be quiet.

BY JANE PORTER

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n October of last year, Mary K Mart hung up her red wig and high heels. She was done hosting drag-bingo fundraising events for a nonprofit she’d worked with for 12 years.

In October of this year, Mary, the alter ego of Randy Light, received a cease-and-desist letter from her former employer’s attorney, demanding that he stop disparaging the organization.

“You are entitled to your own opinions and to broadcast them far and wide,” Sarah L. Ford, an attorney with Parker Poe, wrote on Oct. 28. “But the law does not allow you to make damaging statements (verbally or in print) that you know to be false.”

There’s no question that the outspoken Light has made and continues to make disparaging statements about the Alliance of AIDS Services-Carolina—on Facebook, on the nonprofit’s Guidestar page, to the local media. The issue is whether those statements are, in fact, false.

Light’s central allegation, that the nonprofit owes him and other employees money, is an agreed-upon fact. But on social media, Light has portrayed the alliance as a shambles, plagued by an indifferent board of directors and declining revenues and unwilling or unable to meet its obligations. The nonprofit, on the other hand, says it’s getting back on its feet, and Light’s online vitriol isn’t helping.

Since 1989, the alliance has provided care, prevention and advocacy services to people living with HIV/AIDS. For most of its existence, the alliance’s reputation has been sterling; the drag bingos and other events it has hosted, along with grants from the state and local governments, have raised millions of dollars that go to case management, housing and feeding people with HIV, and providing free HIV testing and prevention advice. But after the Great Recession took hold, fundraising dried up, and by 2014, this once-renowned charity—a Raleigh-based institution that in 2012 had an operating budget of $2 million—hit the rocks.

After an accounting scandal in which the alliance fell behind on its payroll taxes by nearly $210,000, the state and Wake County pulled roughly $400,000 in funding in September 2014. The alliance was forced to furlough its staff for nearly two months, and now its leaders are trying to rebuild.

Randy Light is asking Alliance of AIDS Services–Carolina for payment. PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

INDYweek.com

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news THE DAY BEFORE THANKSGIVING

A Frozen Journey WED, NOV 25 | 3PM

MEYMANDI CONCERT HALL, RALEIGH

THANKSGIVING WEEKEND

Bring the whole family to this one-hour performance, featuring musical selections from The Polar Express, Frozen, and more. Be sure to arrive early to meet our Snow Princesses and visit our popular Instrument Zoo! Tickets just $23!

Holiday Pops FRI, NOV 27 | 7:30PM SAT, NOV 28 | 3PM

ALL NEW SHOW!

MEYMANDI CONCERT HALL, RALEIGH

Join us for all your holiday favorites and our popular sing-a-long, plus new selections from Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas, The Polar Express and Frozen! Be sure to visit Santa in the lobby before the performance!

A Baroque Christmas FRI, DEC 4 | NOON & 8PM SAT, DEC 5 | 8PM MEYMANDI CONCERT HALL, RALEIGH

WED, DEC 9 | 7:30PM MEMORIAL HALL, UNC-CHAPEL HILL

Celebrate the holiday season with works from Bach and Handel, including choral selections from Handel’s glorious Messiah.

Noon Concert Sponsor: The Cardinal at North Hills Chapel Hill Concert Sponsor: The Forest at Duke

Cirque Musica Holiday Spectacular FRI, DEC 18 | 8PM SAT, DEC 19 | 3PM & 8PM MEYMANDI CONCERT HALL, RALEIGH

Your favorite holiday music graces the spell-binding, gravity-defying feats of today’s greatest circus performers!

Weekend Sponsor: Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina

Tickets selling fast — Buy Now! ncsymphony.org | 919.733.2750

RALEIGH • CARY

INDYweek.com

Light, meanwhile, has been complaining loudly that the nonprofit is more than a year late in paying him $1,465 in accrued vacation time. The nonprofit’s board chairperson, Melanie Dubis, acknowledges that this is true. She says the alliance will pay Light and nine other employees who are owed money before the end of this year.

But Light says that’s not good enough.

“I wish the agency the best, I hope they continue to grow and thrive and provide these needed services,” he says. “But they should have already taken care of the folks who were with them a year ago when they were going through this huge financial crisis.”

If anything, the cease-and-desist letter made him all the more adamant that the alliance be called to account.

“I feel I have been as patient and quiet as I need to be at this point,” Light wrote last month to alliance board member Barbara Boney Campbell in a private Facebook message, which he then supplied to the INDY. “I have lost faith in many in this community… and will continue to post as I see necessary… and I have taken the high road only to be disrespected.”

“You know that you don’t look as good as you could when you write about it on Facebook for other people to see,” Campbell replied. “Airing dirty laundry in public is never the right thing to do.”

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his dispute likely wouldn’t have come to light if Mary K Mart weren’t a well-known staple of the Triangle’s LGBTQ community. In 2003, the alliance approached her to host drag-bingo events throughout the area. In 2010, Light was hired as a fulltime event planner tasked with assisting in the production of all the alliance’s fundraising events, including several drag bingos per year, an annual AIDS Walk and an art auction.

Soon after he was hired, though, Light says he noticed the alliance was having difficulties. Donors and volunteers were no longer attending the group’s biggest events.

“The reputation of the alliance wasn’t very favorable in the community,” Light says. He lays the blame on then-executive director John Paul Womble. “Morale was low. It wasn’t a happy environment.”

Womble disputes Light’s characterization. He says the organization was in a transitional period, but “the morale of employees was not low to my recollection, in any way, form or fashion.”

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During his tenure, he says, the alliance was “doing well with volunteers, not losing them.” The financial difficulties, he continues, were the result of the recession.

(Womble resigned in June 2012 over differences with some board members.)

Current alliance board members, however, fault Light for the decline in donor funds.

According to Dubis, the alliance raised more than $476,000 in the year before Light was hired. Three years later, it raised just $148,779.

“That gives you a little flavor of how the financial difficulties arose and accumulated over time,” Dubis says. “The development department over which Mr. Light was in charge was not bringing in the same amount of money that had been brought in in the past.”

Regardless of whose fault it was, the agency was in a full-blown financial crisis by the end of 2012. When Dubis was elected to the board in November 2013, the agency had debts totaling $206,466, not including the $200,000-plus it owed the IRS for missed payroll taxes.

Dubis says the alliance began repaying the IRS beginning in April 2014. By September, awaiting reimbursement for more than $200,000 from the state and Wake County for services already administered, the agency did not have enough cash on hand to continue operating; Wake County terminated its contracts with the alliance. Dubis says the current amount of IRS debt is approximately $74,000.

Amid the turmoil, the agency put all of its employees, including Light, on furlough. Light went to work for another agency, the Chatham Social Health Council, effective Oct. 1, 2014, according to Dubis. (Light says he didn’t resign from the alliance until December).

But Light’s involvement with the CHSC stretched back to at least May 2014. That month, Light and the CSCH’s executive director, Ricky Duck—who is married to Stacy Duck, the alliance’s executive director from June 2012 to December 2014—signed an agreement stating that the alliance, when it was financially stable, would reimburse the CSHC for help with two upcoming dragbingo fundraisers. The events happened— one in August 2014 at the state fairground, and one in October 2014 at Koka Booth Amphitheatre. But Ricky Duck says he never got $5,000 that he was owed.

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RALEIGH • CARY

Dubis counters that she “questions the veracity of the agreement.” Light didn’t have the authority to sign it, she says, and it wasn’t cleared beforehand with the board.

Stacy Duck, however, claims she received an email from a board member granting Light permission to sign the document.

Either way, the alliance has no plans to reimburse the former CHSC, which is now called Wellness & Education Community Action Health Network, or WECAHN. By winter, Light had soured on his former employer. “[The board members] were saying, ‘Oh well, we’ll never work with Mary K Mart anymore,” Light says.

“But they didn’t mind working with me for 12 years.”

And so Mary K Mart took to her widely followed Facebook page. She posted messages that, to Dubis, were “inappropriate at minimum”—insinuating that an alliance drag bingo host looked like Elmer Fudd, for example.

But, unpaid vacation time aside, Dubis says she doesn’t understand how the relationship between the alliance and Light became so embittered.

“People in the sandbox are throwing mud, and it doesn’t serve any purpose from a social standpoint or from a community standpoint,” Dubis says. “This is significant, meaningful work that the alliance is doing.”

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he work may be meaningful, but the alliance is doing less of it. Its operating budget today is $500,000, a quarter of what it was a few years ago.

Although the alliance no longer receives funds from Wake County, it still has three ongoing contracts with the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services totaling $440,000: one for substance abuse counselling, another for HIV prevention and a third for intervention services. (The latter expires next month, though DHHS could renew it.)

A spokesperson from DHHS told the INDY that the state evaluates contracts on a case-by-case basis. The department reinstated contracts with the alliance in October 2014, when the nonprofit was deemed to be in good standing again by the state’s budget office. Sue Lynn Ledford, the director of Wake County’s Public Health Division, says that although the county is no longer funding the alliance, the agency and the county still work together “very nicely” on various projects and at testing sites.

“They are doing what they should be doing right now, trying to stabilize their base operation,” Ledford says. “It takes a bit of time after something like this to stabilize, but once it’s stable, they can begin delivering what they define as their core mission.”

This past September, the alliance hired

2,000 HIV tests and distributed more than 10,000 pounds of food to the community.

“We still collaborate with other former employees,” Salgado says. “Out of the 10 former employees owed [vacation pay], many are still volunteering and in communication with the understanding they will be paid. I think the negative

“None of us are willing to give up what is owed to us.” a new executive director, Hector Salgado.

Salgado makes no bones about the fact that he’s there to “restore the agency” financially, and that in trying to do so, the alliance has dredged up old enmity.

Since he was hired, he says, “We have been doing activities, testing events, Facebook publicity, in an attempt to do my job.” Indeed, the group’s Facebook page features posts almost every day about an upcoming holiday bingo event at the Durham Armory, a Thanksgiving food drive and free HIV/STD testing nights. It has garnered more than a thousand “likes.”

But with the good publicity has come the bad.

“This has kicked up a social media sandstorm where one or two people have gotten support saying we have a lot of funding because we are doing these events, or because I was hired,” Salgado says.

And because the perception exists that the alliance has stabilized, people wonder why Light and others haven’t been paid. “The truth is we are still a struggling nonprofit providing vital services to our community.”

Like Dubis, Salgado says the alliance remains committed to paying its 10 former employees for their accrued vacation time by the end of the year. “There is one individual who says that’s not good enough, who wants to be paid before everyone else,” Salgado says. “Otherwise, we have no outstanding bills.”

Salgado also disputes Light’s charge that the alliance has lost credibility within the LGBTQ community. Even during the financial upheaval, he says, there was never a lapse in the services the agency provided.

Since November 2014, Salgado says, the alliance has provided more than 300 counseling sessions, conducted more than

publicity is unfortunate, but I am here for the rebirth of the alliance. The organization has made mistakes in the past, but we are making great strides toward the future.”

But the best way the alliance can look to the future, at least according to Light and Ricky Duck, is to pay up.

“What I don’t understand is, if they would just pay these 10 employees, pay my agency, pay [any other] agencies, all

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this would go away, and the alliance might actually have a good name in the future,” says Duck. “But as long as they keep dragging everybody through the mud, this could continue forever. None of us are willing to give up what is owed to us.”

Which prompts a larger question: With the loss of contracts, the budget cuts, the downsizing, the changing national environment for health care nonprofits and the bad publicity on top of it all, will the alliance be able to survive?

The alliance says it will. Womble, its former executive director, isn’t so sure.

“It can be done, but it will take an enormous amount of skill, time and energy, and I’m not sure the clock is on their side,” he says. “I pray it is, because the people who founded the alliance and worked with it for years did it with the right vision and compassion and nonjudgement. It was about service. I love that agency, and it just breaks my heart to see what’s happened.” s Jane Porter is an INDY staff writer. Email her at jporter@indyweek.com.

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RALEIGH • CARY

FAMILY FEUD

INDYweek.com

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NOVEMBER 18, 2015

A property dispute has left several low-income Durham residents living in decrepit conditions for the last two years. The city says there’s little it can do about it.

BY DANNY HOOLEY

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t’s a sad Saturday morning for Jessie Gladdek. There was a time she and her family might have spent a day like this at their neighbors’ yard at 611/613 Oakwood Ave., pitching horseshoes or socializing over food as Gladdek snapped pics to capture the memories.

Today, however, her truck is parked in a sloping driveway on the 1400 block of North Hyde Park Avenue in Durham, where she’s helping James and Lisa Seward move for the second time since the couple left the Oakwood Avenue duplex in May. The contrast between the 600 block of Oakwood and the Mallard Avenue block on its north end is becoming increasingly stark. On that short, quiet stretch of Oakwood, all of the current residents are black, and the four houses between Mallard and Primitive Street look from the outside like typical low-income rentals, albeit on the dingier side. On Mallard, however, as in other ClevelandHolloway blocks, young white couples are moving in, many with small children, and there’s near-daily renovation work going on.

The Sewards, who are African-American, lived in 613 Oakwood for seven years.

In 2008, when Gladdek and her husband, Matt—the director of government relations at Downtown Durham Inc.—bought a house just around the corner on Mallard, the younger white couple and the Sewards formed what’s become a lasting bond. They began looking out for each other.

“Whenever new people moved in, we wouldn’t let them fuck with Jessie,” Lisa Seward says.

Gladdek laughs at that. But then she sighs, as sharp and quick as a gasp. It’s that thing people do when they’re trying to keep their emotions in check.

“It still kills me that y’all aren’t over there,” she tells Lisa.

The reason the Sewards are leaving North Hyde Park is depressingly similar to the reason they moved there from Oakwood in the first place: the infestation of roaches and bedbugs, James Seward says. Now they’re trying their luck at a rooming house on Massey Avenue.

For most of the seven years they lived in the Oakwood duplex, the Sewards say, they were fine. But their situation went downhill quickly after August 2013.

That’s when their landlord, William Graham, died at the age of 52. Tenants who were living on that block when William was in charge remember him as reasonable.

“He wasn’t a great landlord,” says Matt Gladdek, “but in comparison to the situation now, he was responsive in really bad situations.”

Since William Graham died, one of his brothers, Lynn Graham, a local realestate entrepreneur, has been renting out the century-old dwellings as if he were the owner. But he’s not. Records show that the properties belong to William Graham’s estate, and his brother David Graham is named as the administrator.

Yet Lynn Graham continues to take in new tenants in spite of unresolved housing code violations. He collects rental payments in cash, often without giving receipts, several current and former tenants told the INDY. And he’s doing so thanks to a drawn-out legal estate mess that’s yet to be resolved.

Simply put, city officials aren’t sure who’s to blame for the houses’ shoddy condition—or how to get the situation fixed.

In Durham, Saqundra Williams opens her water bill for the first time after having it put in her name. It was shut off several times, she says, after her landlord didn’t pay it. PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

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RALEIGH • CARY

he Sewards say Graham allowed the unit they rented for $475 a month to become intolerable by neglecting repairs and turning off the water for several days “every month.” The water bills were in his name, so he could do that whenever he wished.

Other Graham tenants, past and current, give descriptions of exposed wires hanging out of holes in walls, broken appliances, bug and rat infestations, a sewage-like odor in their apartment and frequent water shutoffs. “[Lynn Graham] didn’t want to fix anything,” says Johnny Powell, the Sewards’ former next-door neighbor. “He kept saying he was going to fix stuff, and I just stopped paying him.”

According to Graham’s standard lease agreement, water was supposed to be paid for out of the rent. Neighbors cite two reasons for the frequent shutoffs: negligence on Lynn Graham’s part and retaliation for late payments or some other dispute.

Powell says his water was shut off three times while he and Faith Davis were living in 611 Oakwood with their infant son. His family recently moved out, too.

Compounding matters, each duplex ran on one water line. So if Lynn Graham shut off one tenant’s water, both units suffered.

“It would be about three or four days before he would cut it back on,” James Seward says.

Faith Gardner, manager and housing code administrator of the city’s Neighborhood Improvement Services Department, confirms that Lynn Graham is not the owner of the Oakwood duplexes— and that’s the reason the city hasn’t been able to force him to fix things.

“The difficulty with the Graham estates has been that the ownership has not been clear,” says Gardner. “So even though Lynn Graham is reportedly the person who is collecting rent, he is actually not on the title.

So he is acting as the property manager.”

According to Gardner, the William Graham estate owns the duplexes at 601/603, 607/609 and 611/613 Oakwood Ave. Since August 2013, NIS has opened 11 code-violation cases for those properties.

Only five have been closed through owner compliance. In all, there are currently nine open cases in Durham for properties owned by the William Graham estate. Gardner says a title search conducted by her office led NIS to consider David Graham the likeliest owner.

He lives in Bethesda, Maryland, where Versailles Realty Partners LLC—the business

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Call us today and ask about

William Graham created in 2010, with David Graham as manager —is now registered.

William Browning, the attorney representing William Graham’s estate, says that there are “four or five” claims against it, including one big one, by Investors Title Insurance Co. Joel Craig, the attorney for the title company, says the debt exceeds $75,000.

Another possible hiccup may be claims from William’s widow, Shannon Graham.

In a phone interview, she says she’s “not at liberty to discuss” whether she plans to sue David Graham for a share of the estate.

“I realize that properties have been rented, and they should not be,” she says, leaving it at that. As for any legal conflict with David Graham, she offers that “my [two] children, who should be receiving something from those properties, have received nothing from either [of the Grahams].”

She adds that she’d like to see those properties “fully renovated,” as her late husband wished.

Attempts to contact David Graham were unsuccessful. Lynn Graham, meanwhile, originally agreed to a phone interview but changed his mind and said he wanted to meet for lunch or dinner, or just somewhere with his attorney present. The INDY asked to meet at the publication’s Main Street office. Lynn Graham never called back.

Instead, his lawyer, Sam Roberti, left a message saying his client “is not permitted to disclose any confidential information” to the media and therefore could not be interviewed.

Roberti says Lynn Graham has worked with NIS to get the three duplexes up to code. He acknowledges that Lynn Graham doesn’t own the properties, but portrays his property management as something of a sacrificial act: “It’s been a very difficult job for him to try to help out the estate.”

The estate may be tied up in litigation and “controversy,” Roberti says, but his client is doing what he can. “There are tenants in place,” says Roberti. “He’s trying to do the best he can for them. He believes most of them are quite satisfied.”

At least one family that recently moved into one of the duplexes—but did not want to be named—says that Lynn Graham “did right by us.” They also expressed relief at no longer living in a squalid motel, where prostitutes and drug dealers were a daily sight.

But Latrevette Newkirk isn’t satisfied. She moved into 613 Oakwood after the Sewards

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NOVEMBER 18, 2015

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Wiliams keeps buckets on hand to catch the water that pours through cracks in the ceiling.

PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

left and pays $500 a month in rent.

A Sept. 12, 2014, code inspection of that property shows large cracks in the

brickwork throughout the perimeter of the foundation, unscreened attic vents and unstable front decking that lacks protective

GLAD Study

The Frohlich Lab at UNC-Chapel Hill is looking for individuals who would be interested in participating in a clinical research study.

This study is testing the effect of transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) on mood symptoms of Major Depressive Disorder. Transcranial current stimulation is a technique that delivers a very weak current to the scalp.

Treatment has been well tolerated with no serious side-effects reported. This intervention is aimed at restoring normal brain activity and function which may reduce mood symptoms experienced with Major Depressive Disorder. We are looking for individuals between the ages of 18 and 65, diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder currently not taking benzodiazepines or antiepileptic drugs. You can earn a total of $280 for completing this study.

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coating, just to name a few items.

Even worse, she says, this past June, her water was shut off for the entire month. She showered at neighbors’ houses.

“I had to buy bottled water so I could at least flush the toilet,” Newkirk says. “It was to the point where the man from the city, the Neighborhood Improvement, he went and bought us water himself, because he knew we were spending a lot of money on [bottled] water.”

The Gladdeks also supplied some water from a garden hose in their yard. Jessie Gladdek contacted the NIS about the matter. She was assured, in an email from code enforcement supervisor Clarence L. Harris, that Lynn Graham would be made “aware of the legal requirements of maintaining active utilities during occupancy of the property.”

(This isn’t the first time Lynn Graham has earned the ire of local officials— or appeared in the INDY’s pages. In 2006, this newspaper reported that he’d amassed more than $600,000 in county fines for illegal dumping. An administrative judge later spared him the huge penalty. In the story, attorney Charles Reinhardt described Lynn Graham as someone who “buys and sells properties and makes a profit on the turn, and it’s just one of those things where he’s always trying to stay one step ahead of the next creditor.” The county contracted with Reinhardt to pursue tax collections, and Lynn Graham was among his chief targets.)

Gardner, the NIS supervisor, says she understands how frustrating it is for citizens to see someone appear to work the system. And she admits there’s not much NIS can do when the apparent owner operates out of state. The city can’t drag him into Durham’s Community Life Court, where local landlord-tenant disputes are adjudicated, for instance.

“If the owner is not a local owner, that is not an option for us, simply because we cannot get the summons served out of state,” Gardner says.

The next step for NIS is to go to the Housing Appeals Board and request that the city repair the properties and then place a lien on them.

Gardner anticipates that a hearing will take place by the end of the year.

S

aqundra Williams has lived at 601 Oakwood Ave. with her two daughters, ages 5 and 6, for about eight months. Her toilet doesn’t work properly. A shower leak has caused a dry-rotted dip in the floor, in the cramped space between the toilet and the tub.

She has buckets set up in her bedroom to catch water when it rains.

“It’s spiders, it’s rats, it’s roaches,” she says. “I don’t even have a dog, and I’ve been seeing fleas in this house.”

Right now, she’s not even paying rent.

And she’s gone to Legal Aid to try to get money back from Lynn Graham.

“If I can’t get my money back, I just want him to stop renting to people,” she says. “This man took so much from me and my kids, and destroyed so much of our stuff due to bugs.

My computer won’t even turn on right now because of the bugs.”

Williams works as a certified nursing assistant and is studying phlebotomy at Durham Tech. She’d like to move to Southpoint, she says. As she speaks, a couple of small, light brown roaches crawl up a thermos on a small table in front of her living room sofa.

She may not have to deal with that much longer, even if the city’s hands are tied.

Browning, the attorney for William Graham’s estate, told the INDY last week that he was meeting with David Graham to discuss finding buyers for the properties. If that happens, Williams and her neighbors may have to find some other place to call home.

Jessie Gladdek says it’s obviously too early to tell if a sale would be good or bad, but she’s not optimistic.

“The best thing I would like to see is for the code to be enforced—that they have to fix up the units and actually provide quality affordable housing,” she says. “I don’t have high hopes for that. Given the way Durham is going lately, it’s hard to imagine it being affordable.” s Danny Hooley is a Durham-based freelance writer, an NCCU instructor and staff member for The Carolina Mercury. Respond to this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.

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BUILDING BLOCKS

If Raleigh wants to be a world-class city, it will need to look the part

BY BOB GEARY

I

t’s a little embarrassing.

Here we are in Raleigh, wearing our “world-class” buttons and boasting a College of Design at N.C. State that’s among the nation’s best. So why is there such a “disconnect”—as Robin Abrams, the head of the college’s architecture program, put it delicately—“between the aspirations of Raleigh residents and the reality of our built environment?”

In other words, why is so much of the new in Raleigh blah? And, really, does it matter?

Yes, it does. This is why a group that includes Abrams and Frank Thompson, chair emeritus of CAM Raleigh and the man whose dogged determination is the reason we have a contemporary art museum, hosted a symposium last week called “Build Raleigh Better: Innovation, Architecture, and Creating a World-Class City.” They had the perfect place for it at CAM, a triumph of design that tells us how powerful small buildings can be and that breaking the mold in Raleigh will be a long slough.

The group signaled its aspirations by leading off with Paul Goldberger, the renowned architecture lecturer and critic for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker.

Goldberger’s latest, Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry, is a biography about the architect of such masterpieces as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain—self-described on its website as “the most important structure of its time,” one that “changed the way people think about museums.” No doubt that’s true, and Bilbao, formerly a fading industrial city, is now a tourist destination and the heart of a Basque cultural revival.

Perhaps, Goldberger said, there’s an iconic structure in Raleigh’s future to rival the Guggenheim, or the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco, or the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.

But such wonders are serendipitous, and they emerge from an unpredictable alchemy of political, financial,

philanthropic and design elements. Moreover, as in Bilbao, these forces conjoin—and a Gehry comes in—after a city has laid sufficient groundwork.

Groundwork? Goldberger meant the word literally. “It may be heresy for an architecture critic to say it,” he told us. “But the street is more important than the building.”

And on the street, Goldberger said, the quality of the “ordinary” buildings is more important than having a tall one, even a rare iconic one. It’s like finishing a sentence with an exclamation point: “You need a lot of ordinary letters and words put together well to make a sentence work—before the exclamation point is going to mean anything.”

The real problem today, Goldberger told us, isn’t a shortage of “special buildings.” It’s that we’ve forgotten how to build ordinary buildings well and knit them together as “an urban fabric we like and want to be in.”

He didn’t present it as a Raleigh problem, though we suffer from it. Rather, it’s the result of two factors that exist in every city to varying degrees. One is “big flows of capital”—money—sloshing in from the outside and looking to finance the most generic, low-quality, high-profit products. The second is local leaders who go with the flows.

Simple enough, though Goldberger’s antidotes weren’t. We need strong and assertive city planning. Our commercial developers must up their games. We need a political and civic culture that cares about good design and understands that it adds value to buildings and cities in the long run, bringing equal or higher profits. We must be willing, as a city, to assert our identity.

H

e added these points: l Density is vital. But density means the number of buildings, not just how many people per square mile: “Great cities are full of buildings, the only open spaces are intentional.” Infill is critical. l Preserve older buildings. Goldberger quoted the great

urbanist Lewis Mumford: “In a city, time becomes visible.” l Respect what we have. It’s not necessary to mimic the style of existing buildings. Do respect their scale and resist bigger ones that cause older neighborhoods to “look adrift.” l Maximum density goes downtown. “Density must be managed intelligently,” he said. “It is important to not allow maximum density everywhere.” l Use incentive zoning. Tie approval of tall buildings downtown to open space (plazas, public squares) on the ground. “If a developer doesn’t want to do it and the city doesn’t want to force its hand,” he said, “then you have a problem.” l Drinking on sidewalks? They’ve been drinking and eating on the sidewalks of Paris for 200 years, Goldberger said.

Let developers build whatever and wherever they want, Goldberger warned, and Raleigh could wind up looking like Atlanta. We all gasped, but he laughed and took it back. In that moment, I flashed on Raleigh’s new Unified Development Ordinance, which invites big, generic buildings all over the city, without much in the way of design standards or incentives for quality.

Why does any of this matter? It’s because cities can offer the “civilizing, nurturing environment” we need. Our environment, like art, can enhance our lives.

As Goldberger said, “The generic city stops caring about things that are different.”

Things that are different, and people, too. But welcoming difference is what cities must be about. s Bob Geary is an INDY columnist. Reach him at rjgeary@mac.com.

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music& drink eat

A SIMMERING HISTORY

How a documentary about late Southern food icon Bill Neal gave his son new understanding of his father BY JILL WARREN LUCAS

M

att Neal has been interviewed many times about his famous father, the chef Bill Neal.

He has answers about how Neal, a small-town North Carolina boy who taught himself to cook by working his way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, achieved so much in so little time. By his mid 30s, the elder Neal had helmed two essential Triangle restaurants and written a book, Bill Neal’s Southern Cooking, that became a landmark of the region’s cuisine. He was arguably the cook who made shrimp and grits a staple of contemporary Southern cuisine.

The gracious co-owner of Neals’ Deli in Carrboro has even decided there’s no point in getting offended when asked about the end of his parents’ decade-long marriage or his father’s romance with Gene Hamer, a colleague at La Residence and partner at Crook’s Corner. He’s even accustomed to being asked how it felt when, in 1991, his charismatic father died from AIDS at the age of 41.

So when Matt agreed to be interviewed yet again last spring for a documentary about his father commissioned by the Southern Foodways Alliance, he expected not to be surprised by revisiting the familiar turf. What caught him off guard, however, was the filmmakers’ interest in a casual reference to his father’s writings, stashed away in a box in the attic.

Durham filmmakers Kate Medley and Jesse Paddock were surprised, too, that this wealth of materials had been sitting, almost forgotten and entirely unexplored, in Bill Neal’s post-divorce home so long. Matt, who lives their now with his wife, Sheila, and two children, escorted Medley upstairs. What they found became the key of They Came for Shrimp and Grits: The Life and Work of Bill Neal, a short but dense and powerful documentary that explores and expands the scope of Neal’s accomplishments.

“The family was very generous. They gave us full access,” recalls Medley, who works as a photographer and filmmaker for Whole Foods Market. “Matt had boxes of things in his attic that he’d never looked at. It was a treasure trove of handwritten recipes, writing and correspondence and sketchbooks.

There also were medical bills and records.”

The scope of unpublished documents in the boxes dumbfounded Matt, offering new insight into the father he’d lost nearly a quarter-century earlier. They covered not only his food writing but also drafts of pieces about other interests—gardening, travel, his declining health. While Matt lived and worked elsewhere before returning to live at his dad’s old house, renters had miraculously left the boxes intact.

“Most of it is cookbook notes, menus, journals, sketches. In some cases, I really remember what he was writing about, or when it was,” says Matt, now 44. “I thought I had about a third of what I actually had.”

Medley and Paddock finished the 13-minute documentary just minutes before the film premiered last month at the annual SFA symposium in Oxford, Mississippi. (A local screening is in the works for January in Chapel Hill.) Neal is open to working with them on an extended version of the documentary. After all, they helped him learn about his own late father.

“They were sensitive and smart to the story,” he says. “I found it very moving and engaging, though I’m a bit biased.”

John T. Edge, the executive director of SFA, agrees that the film represents a balanced look at Neal’s brief, brilliant life

and a significant achievement for Medley.

She previously produced a series of SFA shorts called Counter Histories, regarding the role of food in the civil rights movement.

“Last year, we asked her to explore the burdens of racism and the heroic stories of Southerners who fought that bastard Jim Crow,” Edge explains. “This year, our assignment required more subtlety. She juggled narratives of fame, creativity, sexuality, family and mythology. She accomplished all with aplomb and sensitivity.”

Medley and Paddock interviewed many people who were part of Neal’s culinary circle, some of whom are still active in the area’s food scene. There’s Moreton Neal, his former wife and the author of Remembering Bill Neal: Favorite Recipes From a Life in Cooking, and Crook’s Corner chef Bill Smith, who succeeded Neal in that role just as he’d done previously at La Residence.

Last May, Gene Hamer, Crook’s owner and Neal’s former partner, was inexplicably omitted from a panel discussion on the 30th anniversary and enduring impact of Bill Neal’s Southern Cooking at a UNC conference. They Came for Shrimp and Grits corrects that, allowing Hamer to offer red-eyed recollections of his last conversation with Neal and his sense of his friend’s lingering presence at Crook’s.

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eat &

How the sausage was made: Filmmaker Jesse Paddock holds the rescued sausage recipe of Bill Neal. PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

GUT

O

na up de New York Times food writer Kim a nocturn Severson presents a thoughtful assessment of Neal’s role as a magnet for exceptional the refrige talent, even if he famously declined to givefor somet a break to Magnolia Grill’s Ben and Karen preparatio into a sub Barker. (Still, the couple later required My han all Magnolia cooks to study Bill Neal’s pint jar, it Southern Kitchen.) still seale And those who did put in time with exclaimed Neal at Crook’s before achieving renown elsewhere share insights about Neal’s passionRICH//D thought, w for promoting regional foodways and his night coll seemingly manic temperament in the A quart kitchen. John Currence of City Grocery in myself to Oxford, Mississippi, for instance, speaks with inaugural palpable regret about never mending fences after an argument with Neal that ended with traditiona the younger chef flinging a cup of hot coffee Eastern N now sold b at his boss. But there are many references to Neal’s influence in Currence’s cookbook, Brand Pic Hillsborou Pickles, Pigs & Whiskey. who has b “You can still see that it really hurts him,” notes Matt. “But John has paid his jellies and produce s own dues in the meantime. He’s really pushed and promoted my dad’s legacy.” decade, F Neal’s importance extends far beyond April McG about the his recipes, though. He believed food a folkloris could say a lot about who someone was and where that person was from. He made kimchi at the claim in 1986 to Bill Friday during an her to its e She soo episode of North Carolina People in a rare making it— video appearance that opens They Came storing the for Shrimp & Grits. Young and confident, Neal contends that, whether a conscious them—lef just tasted decision or reflexive habit, the food we So McG choose to consume connects each of us Some ver with a time and place. Now a tenet of when she foodways studies, that notion was still novel at the time. In only 13 minutes, They the first fr Came for Shrimp & Grits gets to the core of At last, sh staples—c Neal’s decades of impact.

“Anywh “It’s really touching for me and my history of family,” Matt says. “It’s like when Dean Smith’s players started missing him again; people we preservin they, like others, talk with praise. They don’t have to do that, but they’ve all gone of differe McGrege out of their way to do so.” s are two of Jill Warren Lucas blogs at Eating My Words. Southern Farmer To see the film, visit www.southernfoodways. available org/film/they-came-for-shrimp-grits-thearea food life-and-work-of-bill-neal musk with

GUTEN GREEN

O

n a recent weeknight, up late with a looming deadline and the need for a nocturnal snack, I peered into the refrigerator, poking around for something that didn’t require preparation or wouldn’t lull me into a subsequent sugar daze.

My hand at last landed on a pint jar, its black screw-top lid still sealed by a paper sticker that exclaimed: “RAW//PROBIOTICRICH//DELICIOUS.” Sure, I thought, why not have some latenight collard kraut?

A quarter-hour later, I forced myself to return the lid to my inaugural jar of collard kraut, traditional if somewhat obscure Eastern North Carolina fare now sold by Farmer’s Daughter Brand Pickles & Preserves in Hillsborough. A Mississippi native who has been canning jams and jellies and pickling most any produce she could buy for nearly a decade, Farmer’s Daughter owner April McGreger didn’t even know about the idea of collard kraut until Farmer’s Daughter and a collard’s kraut PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER a folklorist who tried her collard kimchi at a farmers market tipped piling shredded and fermented cabbage her to its existence. atop hotdogs. And it has that customary She soon found that the customary way of crunch, too, as the liquid has only loosened making it—soaking whole leaves in salt and the fibers without making them limp. storing them for several weeks, then cooking But the start of the bite is strangely them—left a lot to be desired. To her, they smooth and tender, as if your teeth are just tasted like vinegar-doused collards. expecting resistance long before they meet So McGreger started to experiment. it. After the first wave of flavor passes, Some versions were too soft and chewy; you’ll notice a zing that dances across when she used collards harvested before your tongue and toward your nose, like the first frost, the results were too tough. apple-cider vinegar. There’s no vinegar in At last, she thought to merge the two kraut the recipe, though. That’s the tang of the staples—cabbage and collards—into one. collards—rubbed by hand with salt and “Anywhere in the South that has a then ladled with red and black pepper and history of sustenance farming, where garlic and cumin and allowed to ferment people were growing their own food and for weeks—calling. preserving it year round, they used a lot Actually, the refrigerator is calling, too: I of different methods to preserve food,” need to preserve some of these for my next McGreger says. “And cabbage and collards hotdog. —Grayson Haver Currin are two of the more important foods in Southern history.”

Eat This is a recurring column about great Farmer’s Daughter’s turn on kraut, new dishes and drinks in the Triangle. available on the company’s website and in Had something you loved? Email area food and wine shops, indeed sports a food@indyweek.com. musk with which you will be familiar from

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ARTS

AWARDS

2015

The INDY had existed for less than a decade when, in 1990, the young newspaper paused to honor community artists. That year, the INDY named 16 professors, sponsors, spaces, bands, impresarios and organizations as its inaugural “Indies Arts Awards” winners.

Some of those recipients are still active— Alice Gerrard was nominated for her first Grammy last year—while others, like the author Reynolds Price, have passed away.

Yet the INDY has maintained the tradition for a quarter-century now. The numbers have fluctuated over the years.

(As if the editors had exhausted most of their early ideas for round one, there were but five winners in 1991.) And so has the answer to the unending question of who deserves the recognition most: individual artists doing compelling work or the architects of systems that allow for that work to thrive.

This year, for the 26th annual Indies Arts Awards, the latter prevailed. The six people selected for this year’s prize have changed the very landscape of arts in the Triangle by building new establishments in which makers, doers and thinkers can matter even more. With her rock club and community space The Pinhook, Kym Register has mustered a platform for the arts in much the same way as Chris Tonelli has done with his poetry readings, press and bookstore and Dasan Ahanu (a rare repeat Indies winner) has with his spoken-word performances and writing workshops. At UNC, Emil Kang has built a world-class performing arts series that offers area audiences exposure to masters we might otherwise watch only on YouTube. And with their respective music festivals, Greg Lowenhagen and Cicely Mitchell have helped reshape the way Raleigh and Durham can be perceived as complex, viable entertainment venues.

In fact, in some capacity, all of this year’s Indies recipients have done just that: conceptually altered a physical landscape we thought we knew in order to make a more robust arts scene.

—Grayson Haver Currin

NOVEMBER 18, 2015

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Destination downtown

Hopscotch’s Greg Lowenhagen and Art of Cool Fest’s Cicely Mitchell prove the Triangle’s viability for innovative music festivals

BY CHRIS VITIELLO

S

ervers push tables together for the Sunday brunch crowd at downtown Durham’s Beyù Caffè. Andrew Berenson is banging out Thelonious Monk on the piano. Cicely Mitchell is describing how the Art of Cool Fest, which she co-founded, has transformed from a cool idea to a year-round endeavor.

“This is my life’s work,” she says with evangelical intensity.

“This is how much we believe in filling a demographic void.”

The three-day, genre-blurring jazz and R&B festival wrapped its second year last spring, with an outdoor main stage at the old Durham Bulls ballpark and side stages in various Durham nightclubs.

The model was inspired by what Raleigh’s Hopscotch Music Festival had done; the booking was more inspired by what it hadn’t— representing a fuller spectrum of black artists and culture.

Mitchell and Hopscotch co-founder Greg Lowenhagen are among the key visionaries who have helped Durham and Raleigh’s downtowns transform from shuttered to bustling. Hopscotch proved the viability of a downtown music festival in Raleigh; Mitchell carried that vitality across city and color lines to highlight black-owned interests in Durham’s complex rejuvenation.

As Mitchell readies the third Art of Cool Fest for next May and Lowenhagen plans the seventh Hopscotch Music Festival for next September, they are unwavering in their focus on local

performers, audiences and businesses, even as they expand the scope of their ambitions. But despite wide acclaim and hundreds of thousands of dollars of economic impact, these festivals are still run from kitchen tables in their founders’ homes.

S

urprisingly, Mitchell wasn’t a jazz fan from birth. Growing up in Dyersburg, Tennessee, her family listened to blues and soul—jazz was always a little intimidating. Even more surprisingly, Match.com played a considerable role in creating the Art of Cool Fest.

That’s how Mitchell met trumpeter, bandleader and composer Al Strong. She was getting a master’s degree in biostatistics at UNC-Chapel Hill and was too busy to date. He wanted to meet someone outside of the clubs where he played.

“I met Al, and then I got the bug,” Mitchell says. “Growing up, you want to get into jazz but you don’t know where to start. But with Al, it became second nature just by hanging out. Then you just want to convert everybody. We say that we’re doing the Lord’s work.”

Mitchell saw how hard Strong and other musicians worked.

Where others might have picked up an instrument, she grabbed the laptop and started Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and email

PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

INDIES

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INDIES

ARTS

AWARDS

2015

L

owenhagen leans forward when he talks, as if gravity might get the sentences out of his mouth faster. He dunks a tortilla chip in a bowl of salsa at a restaurant a block or two from almost all 12 Hopscotch venues.

“It could have been a hot sauce festival,” he says of Hopscotch. “It could have been putting on plays in the park. It could have been lots of different ideas.”

When Lowenhagen moved to Raleigh for a job as a sales representative at the INDY in 2009, he saw opportunity rather than vacancy when he walked downtown.

“I noticed how close-knit the music venues were and how cool downtown was,” he says. “Since the INDY already had relationships with a lot of these venues as advertising clients, there was an entrée.”

Envisioning the constellation of downtown music venues as the festival’s footprint, Lowenhagen pitched the INDY on a music festival.

Steve Schewel, then the paper’s owner, was ready for the pitch.

“The idea of a music festival was something that I had been vaguely contemplating for a while, but it wasn’t until Greg made the idea concrete that it seemed like we could really do it,” Schewel says.

The venues fell in line behind festival co-founders Lowenhagen and INDY music editor Grayson Haver Currin. (The INDY no longer has any ties to Hopscotch, with the paper selling its stake in 2012 and Currin stepping down as co-director in 2013; the majority share of the festival is now owned by a group of Etix employees.)

“A lot of the downtown people had been there a long time already, taking risks, paying taxes,” Schewel says.

“Most of them were willing to try it for one year. And now we’re heading into year seven.”

Lowenhagen grew up in Cohasset, Massachusetts. The music collection in his house ranged from his mother’s Motown records to his father’s soft rock. Cohasset also housed the South Shore Music Circus, a community venue where Lowenhagen saw live comedy and mid-level acts.

Hopscotch’s eclecticism is grounded in that mixed roster.

Lowenhagen dove into the Chapel Hill club scene as an undergrad at UNC before a 1999 move to Austin, one of the country’s music-festival epicenters. South by Southwest was already one of the largest in the world, and Austin City Limits added its festival in 2002. Lowenhagen tallied the PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

lists. And she looked for new venues to get the music to audiences, such as Durham’s LabourLove Gallery in Golden Belt, where a one-off concert by Strong in 2011 turned into a monthly series programmed by Mitchell. That led to pop-up concerts all over town and, finally, a festival pitch that won the $25,000 Startup Stampede.

“We figured, if we’re going to pitch something, let’s pitch something big,” Mitchell remembers. She loved the Hopscotch model of using multiple venues and thought Durham was ripe for the same approach. So she pitched a weekend festival with a core of local musicians, exploring traditional jazz and its modern linkages with soul, R&B, rap, pop and hip-hop.

“There’s a rich tradition of black American music in Durham,” she says.

“It’s very important to show that that music is vibrant and accessible to everyone—black, white, young, old. The festival is about discovering the city and showing it off to friends and family.

It’s been described as a homecoming or family reunion-style jazz festival.”

The festival’s fit for Durham isn’t lost on Duke Performances director Aaron Greenwald, who is on Art of Cool’s advisory board.

“We ought not lose sight of the fact that we live in a city that’s as black as it is white and has been for a long time,” says Greenwald. “The fact that [Mitchell’s] focus has been on black music, starting with jazz and orbiting out—that’s really important and vital.”

In addition to conducting focus groups with Greenwald and other local cultural leaders, Mitchell asked Lowenhagen for guidance on turning itinerant pop-ups into a full-blown festival.

“Greg was pretty key in helping giving some real-life experience,” Mitchell says. “How many venues is enough or too many? Should it be two days or three days? How do the wristbands work, and where do you get them? If Greg had not been so open-book, it would have been really hard to bring forth Art of Cool as fast as we did. We’ve always been a little cousin to Hopscotch because of that relationship.”

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pros and cons of these events firsthand. The con that stood out? Not enough local music.

“The large festivals like Coachella or Bonnaroo don’t have the local and international mix that Hopscotch has,” he says. “There aren’t a lot of central Tennessee bands playing Bonnaroo.” Roughly 40 percent of the bands at Hopscotch this year were from North Carolina.

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or 2016, Mitchell is streamlining Art of Cool’s ticketing and moving the festival indoors to The Pinhook, Motorco Music Hall, PSI Theatre and the Carolina Theatre, where trumpeter Terence Blanchard is the headliner. Some of Kendrick Lamar’s session players, such as Thundercat and sax player Terrace Martin, will also be featured.

Lowenhagen is also expanding the Hopscotch brand. He partnered with Raleigh design group New Kind two years ago to add the Hopscotch Design Festival, which applies the same eclecticism to the world of design.

The obsessive focus of both directors has made a substantial economic impact in the Triangle: an estimated $1.5 million impact by Hopscotch’s second year and $700,000 from last year’s Art of Cool.

Neither gets much financial support from the cities, however. Hopscotch has always been privately owned, so the Greater Raleigh Convention and Visitors Bureau has lent it marketing support but not hard cash. The nonprofit Art of Cool receives $5,000 from the City of Durham—a measly 2 percent of the festival’s total budget. That’s a pretty sweet return on investment.

The cultural momentum that Lowenhagen and Mitchell have started is more visible. The success of Hopscotch helped Raleigh lure the International Bluegrass Music Association’s annual festival away from Nashville three years ago, and it’s hard to imagine Moogfest moving to Durham from Asheville without Hopscotch and Art of Cool as proof of concept. Art of Cool is also a crucial force against gentrification in the boom of downtown Durham.

Mitchell and Lowenhagen are as devoted to their cities as they are to the music they program.

“When we built Art of Cool, I really did want people to partake of the city, the downtown footprint,” Mitchell says, “and really be about more than just the music but the full-on experience of downtown—the music, the food, the drinks, the beer, the art galleries, the best ice cream place in the state.”

“The fans really set the tone—attentive, upbeat,” Lowenhagen adds. “Fans only spend their money with us for one thing—tickets. Once they buy a ticket from us, all the other money they spend goes somewhere else in the city.”

Though the efforts of many have been involved in the Triangle’s music-festival boom, none of it would have happened without these two daring to dream that their beloved cities were more ambitious and sophisticated than they were sometimes held to be. Thanks to them, our downtowns are not diversions, but destinations.

Chris Vitiello is the INDY’s visual art columnist.

Twitter: @ChrisVitiello

PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

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eaving Carolina Performing Arts’ October presentation of Antigone—the critically divisive new production from avant-garde director Ivo van Hove, starring Juliette Binoche—I heard people complaining that the lights were too bright, the music too screechy. I heard them debating the efficacy of various contemporized roles.

But I didn’t hear anyone saying “meh.”

This kind of heated, polarized response is music to the ears of Emil Kang, the director of UNC-Chapel Hill’s performing arts organization for the last decade.

“I don’t want to know if people liked it or not,” Kang says, in his candid way, of the challenging shows he books.

“The best thing you could tell me is, ‘I’m really glad you brought this because it made my life better, richer; I feel like I’m a happier person because I’m able to attend performances like this.’”

It’s no small order in an area habituated to a familiar, steady diet of world-class string quartets and modern dance mainstays, but that’s the kind of big game Kang, intent on leading rather than following his patrons’ tastes, is after.

One hesitates to cast the region’s academic presenters in a horse race; they all add something valuable. But this year in particular, Carolina Performing Arts is challenging established pacesetter Duke Performances as the most daring.

Generously peppered in among such safe bets as Alvin Ailey and The Nutcracker are Ensemble Intercontemporain’s bracing modernist chamber music, Shara Worden’s experimental court masque and Compagnie Marie Chouinard’s avant-garde dance.

Through his patient global ambassadorship, his distaste for the habitual and appetite for the unknown, and his singularly intense conviction that art can change lives, Kang is ushering Chapel Hill into a global conversation with larger urban arts centers around the world.

Mark Katz, the director of UNC’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities, says, “What he’s been able to do in just over 10 years is pretty astonishing, bringing visionary artists from a very wide range of fields to Carolina

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and facilitating new works.”

These cutting-edge artists offer chances to test your preconceptions rather than confirming what you already like. None of them has any reason to come here beyond Kang’s personal belief in, and diligent courtship of, their work.

“This is going to sound really cowboylike, but we don’t program based on a prediction of the audience’s response,” Kang says. “I believe programming should be done by leadership, not by consensus.

Then, at the very least, we can say we’re doing something we believe in.”

Shara Worden is a singer and new-music composer who leads the baroque pop band My Brightest Diamond. Her You Us We All, a collaboration with director Andrew Ondrejcak and the ensemble BOX, swirls proto-opera for period instruments in a martini glass with Beyoncé and the Olsen twins. Following its 2013 European premiere, its first U.S. run comes only to the Brooklyn Academy of Music and UNC’s Memorial Hall.

“BAM has alliances with performing arts presenters nationally, [but] Carolina Performing Arts ... has the distinction of being consistent in responding to works like the Shara Worden opera,” says Joseph V. Melillo, BAM’s executive producer.

Such coups are the result of Kang’s longterm efforts behind the scenes.

“Shara wouldn’t have come with this opera if she hadn’t been with us before,” he says. (Carolina Performing Arts has

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explains. “I’ve had arguments with artists about this. I tell them it’s not my cup of tea, but I think you have something to say. I did that recently and had a 17-hour conversation over bourbon.”

Kang says bigger changes are to come. He wants to free Carolina Performing Arts from the constraints of tradition, building memorable encounters and lasting bonds with artists.

“Seasons are always sprinkled with a few one-and-done artists, which I don’t mean critically,” Kang says. “If we had our druthers we would present only artists we are building relationships with, who are here for multiple days and required to engage with the community.

We want to eliminate the transactional nature of the arts.”

BY BRIAN HOWE To that end, outreach is the next phase, though Kang shies commissioned work from her in the past.) away from the term.

Likewise, this is its second Chouinard “It feels unidirectional, and I don’t commission, following 2009’s unforgettable believe our future lies in getting more Orpheus et Eurydice. butts in seats,” he says. “This doesn’t “I’ve been chasing Ivo van Hove and mean we won’t continue it, but celebrating Ensemble Intercontemporain around the passive experience in a sacred space Europe for years,” Kang says. “If artists doesn’t represent our future. How do we abroad are looking into America through become a consistent presence on and off the news media, the American South campus, with programming initiatives that wouldn’t be the first place they think of. are about active engagement rather than We’re trying to change that mentality, but sitting in the dark?” you can only change it one artist at a time.”

In the meantime, Kang continues to Kang wants authentic encounters more crisscross the globe, searching for the next than ticket sales. He is most interested in show that will ennoble Chapel Hill. “He is developing relationships—his watchword— unstoppable in terms of his work ethic and among presenters, artists and audiences. travel schedule,” Katz says. “People draw His measured speech belies an almost energy from his energy and enthusiasm.” messianic fervor. For Kang, booking is “When I get dropped off in the almost painfully personal. middle of nowhere, I love the feeling,” “The answer is simple: We want to,” he Kang says. He blends the grand vision says of force-feeding Chapel Hill daunting of a great presenter with the intimate artists. “There isn’t any sneaky agenda to commitment of his belief that meaning lies bring difficult work. But we do then fight in respectful engagement, not detached tooth and nail over budget projections, and observation. He is now on a discovery performances I care about a lot end up on mission in Pakistan, learning how he the cutting-room floor. I mourn each of their might present its contemporary art and losses—grieve their deaths, in a way.” building relationships that will lead him in This seriousness of purpose translates unexpected directions. into uncompromising honesty. Kang “We go where the artist is and talk to forgoes flattery in order to build a fearlessly them over time about our interest in them,” committed, trustworthy brand. Preferring he says. “It is all of that effort that leads to enrichment to pleasure, he sometimes this.” Before he left, he went to a Pakistani books work he doesn’t actually enjoy. boutique to buy a shalwar kameez. s “I don’t have to like a particular work to believe it’s important for us to do,” he Brian Howe is the INDY’s arts editor.

World leader

Carolina Performing Arts’ Emil Kang brings the global avant-garde to Chapel Hill through personal determination

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The Pinhook’s Kym Register uses her rock club to empower Durham voices

BY ALLISON HUSSEY

W

hen Kym Register sits on the back patio of The Pinhook, the rock club and de facto community center she opened in 2008, the layers of modern Durham unfold before her.

Panning from right to left, there’s the American Tobacco Campus and its web of high-end restaurants, offices and apartments, capped by the old Lucky Strike tower and abutted by railroad tracks. In the middle sits the rear wall of Durham Bulls Athletic Park, which glows like a lantern in the summer, and DPAC’s gleaming glass front. On the far left, the looming complex of the Durham County Detention Facility and new courthouse serves as a constant reminder of the city’s historic and present struggles with race and inequality. And from the front door, Register’s view of imminent skyscrapers and boutique hotels is one of constant flux, increased capital and new problems and possibilities.

But one aspect of Main Street likely won’t change for quite some time: The Pinhook. In February 2013, Register became the sole owner of the business.

Later in the year, she bought the building outright, recommitting to running more than a moneymaking venture.

“The business aspect of The Pinhook has always been second to the communitybuilding aspect and the political aspect,” Register says. “I’ve always seen music as something that is über-political and lifechanging, a thing that people can access across identities.”

And so like the people it attracts, The Pinhook harbors various labels. Initially called a gay bar, it’s perhaps now best known as a spot where the drinks start pouring at 5 p.m. daily and a venue that hosts shows until last call, offering nocturnal activities ranging from karaoke, trivia and drag performances to concerts that span rock and folk, metal and hip-hop.

One night The Pinhook may seem like an international dance club, only to function as a small independent cinema the next.

When downtown Durham was still barren, Register helped found The Pinhook with two friends. Everyone, she reckoned, should have access to a performance space, regardless of race,

gender identity or politics. A Durham native, Register had some experience with such spaces through Bull City Headquarters, a short-lived but pivotal launchpad for the city’s emerging scene.

Music helped Register, who identifies as queer and embraces radical politics, feel less isolated in her own Southern town.

She realized, though, that a DIY aesthetic could be limiting. For instance, her former band, Midtown Dickens, struggled to get shows at bona fide clubs like Cat’s Cradle or Local 506 when she would drop off demos wrapped in handsewn packages. She wanted to create easier access.

“One thing I thought about this space is that it can be a more legitimized club in the eyes of the world than a DIY venue,” she remembers, “and still have that DIY aesthetic.”

The mind-set applies to The Pinhook’s role as an activist space, too. The club hosts politically inclined benefits, like a recent Halloween dance for an organization that posts bail for people arrested while protesting the state. And it has often served as a rendezvous point for some of the city’s political movements.

In another DIY holdover, Register hires her friends to help shape the space.

Heather McEntire, a fellow musician, worked behind the bar from 2010 through 2014. At the beginning of October, McEntire’s band Mount Moriah celebrated the release of a new single by playing their first show in a year. They could have played a bigger venue, but she chose The Pinhook.

“I knew it would be a warm space,” McEntire explains. “We wanted it to be where we felt comfortable. It does feel like home.”

Melvin Peña, perhaps The Pinhook’s biggest fan and most dedicated regular, was in the crowd that night. He met

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capitalist world have to be successful, and success is not measured in the ways success can be measured on a personal level,” Register, 33, says.

“Doing things that feel good, creating community—it’s actually about getting money in the door. That’s been a hard marriage of politics and business.”

So she books about 16 events per month, from recurring dance parties like Party Illegal and Dishoom to concerts featuring a mix of national and local acts.

There are open mics each Monday and trivia contests each Tuesday. And if Register has a free night, The Pinhook is often available to those in need of a room.

She has to balance her business with her art, as she’s still the songwriter of the folkrock bands Loamlands.

Leaving for a week of dates with singer-songwriter Natalie Prass presents a challenge, certainly, but McEntire says having a boss who is a touring musician makes The Pinhook that much more beneficial to an artistic economy.

“She offers shifts and positions where we can be flexible and go on tour,” McEntire explains. “She’s doing the same thing. You didn’t have to nervously ask your boss, ‘Can I have these two weeks off?’”

Sitting on a couch in The Pinhook’s front room, Register says she recognizes the importance of maintaining a space like this in an evolving city. Lose sight of the mission, and watch big money commandeer downtown’s smallest spaces.

“I couldn’t let it go because it’s such a part of my identity, and such a hub for the people in the community essentially just being themselves,” Register says. “There’s no way to let it go.” s

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Register years ago, soon after he started coming to the bar to hang out after work while waiting out rush-hour traffic before heading home to North Raleigh. Register’s enthusiasm was infectious.

“She was always extremely welcoming, extremely kind and extremely generous,” Peña says. “Feeling comfortable at a place is down to the staff.”

Register’s focus on making patrons feel welcome extends beyond friendly chats, of course. Signs in and around genderneutral bathrooms encourage consent and discourage hateful language. Register says employees feel a special ownership of the space because its values sync with theirs; you get the sense that the same applies to those who play, drink or dance at The Pinhook.

The crowds are a loose confederation born of entertainment and ideology.

But keeping a community space afloat isn’t easy, even when you own the real estate.

“Venues and businesses that exist in this

Allison Hussey is the calendar editor of the INDY. Find her: @allisonhussey.

INDYweek.com

Rhyming reason

Durham poet Dasan Ahanu uses hip-hop education and action to inspire more work

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Jr., Kellie Jones and Elizabeth Alexander.

Despite his background as a professor of English and creative writing, Ahanu admits his introduction to Harvard’s intense pedagogical environment caught him by surprise.

“Each discipline had its beginning-of-the-semester programming. So there were all of these speakers and receptions and talks. It took me a while to not feel like I was spinning around in circles,” says Ahanu, strolling across campus in Cambridge.

“Everything is happening at a high level. It’s not like I haven’t been in an intellectual space before, but to have so much happening at one time is a lot.”

Ahanu has adjusted. In early November, he delivered his first presentation at Harvard for a colloquium called “Shots Fired: Examining a Lyrical Canon.” A week later, at neighboring Northeastern University, he delivered the same lecture at the request of Murray Forman, a Northeastern professor and the co-editor of the classroom-canonized text That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader. Ahanu used the talks as a testing ground for the ideas he’ll examine in a forthcoming paper meant to balance institutional and on-theground perceptions of hip-hop lyricism.

“What hip-hop heads talk about in terms of lyrics is not the same as what scholars talk about,” says Ahanu. “My perspective will be different because I actually touch the art and touch the culture on a regular basis.”

Indeed, Ahanu is as devoted to praxis as he is to theory. Before he left for Harvard, he released the spoken-word album Last Temptation Before Sunrise: the prologue. He recently completed his first play, HERstory PHOTO BY MELODY KO

orth Carolina has retained a poet laureate for nearly seven decades. In that time, however, North Carolina has never had an AfricanAmerican poet laureate.

Dasan Ahanu can barely imagine a scenario where that might happen.

“There is a whole group of faith-based and spokenword poets of color that aren’t necessarily thought of in these situations,” Ahanu, the Durham-based poet, playwright and educator, told me last summer.

Gov. Pat McCrory had recently appointed Valerie Macon to the poet laureate position, in spite of a paltry publishing résumé.

The move met strong, swift controversy. I asked Ahanu, or Christopher D. Massenburg, for his take on the debacle not long after Macon resigned in response to “negative attention.”

“Would an artist like myself really be considered for the position?” Ahanu said, noting the state’s availability of prominent, overlooked African-American poets, including Jaki Shelton Green. “Is that something that could be aspired to in North Carolina? What response would my appointment bring?”

Amid the fallout, McCrory installed Shelby Stephenson as the state’s new poet laureate.

A retired UNC-Pembroke professor who writes country music songs, pens pieces about hunting possums and lives on a family farm where his great-great grandfather owned African-American slaves, Stephenson seemed more qualified than Macon. But it was a conservative, safe move.

By contrast, Ahanu was an assistant professor at Raleigh’s historically black Saint Augustine’s University. He records with rappers, writes championship-caliber slam poetry and is the president of the local Black Jedi Chapter of the worldwide hip-hop organization Universal Zulu Nation. That is,

too black to speak for the state, despite his efforts to put poetry to work in North Carolina.

But this summer, Ahanu, 41, got his validation: He received a letter from Harvard University’s Hiphop Archive & Research Institute, naming him a 2015–2016 Nasir Jones Hiphop fellow. He accepted. Then, in August, just weeks before Ahanu nabbed the keys to his office inside the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, he received a rejection letter from the North Carolina Arts Council. He hadn’t been chosen for its 2015–2016 Artist Fellowship Award.

He missed out on a National Education Association Foundation grant, too.

“I didn’t get these but I got the Harvard Fellowship,” he wrote on social media. “Next time it will be something else. This is the life I chose and love. We push.”

Since September, Ahanu has pushed his way back and forth from the Triangle to Cambridge, juggling performances within the state’s tightly knit spoken-word poetry circuit with lugging stacks of research across Harvard’s campus. He has cozied up to Ivy League intellectuals like Henry Louis Gates

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BY ERIC TULLIS

through HIS Eyes, too. The script elaborates on some of Ahanu’s emotionally charged poetry as narrative devices for two women, Kim and Tina, escapees of abusive relationships. Rooted in Ahanu’s antiviolence activism with the organization Men Against Rape Culture, the play debuted in October at Common Ground Theatre.

The play borrows heavily from his personal experiences of watching his father’s alcoholism and violent habits rip his family apart, moments that had informed his poetry for two decades. Putting the pain on stage placed it in a new perspective.

“When I started doing the work, I started to discover the survivors that were in my life” says Ahanu. “I’ve had partners and been in relationships with people who are survivors.

It made me see how impactful [domestic and sexual violence] is.”

Ahanu returned to Durham for HERstory’s premiere, but his academic obligations in Cambridge meant he handed the directiorial duties to actress Debrita Channelle. Ahanu also took a step back from his coaching responsibilities with the Bull City Slam Team and hosting duties at Hayti Heritage Center’s monthly Jambalaya Soul Slam event in order to head to Harvard.

Already, he’s eager to return to Durham after completing the one-year residential portion of the fellowship.He’ll still have a two-year non-residential allotment left, giving him access to the Hutchins Center’s archives for his lyricism thesis.

But by resuming his weekly City Soul Cafe open-mic event in Raleigh or his Radical Voice and Artistic Expression workshop at Durham’s Carrack Modern Art, he hopes to help build incubators for his fellow and future writers, not simply ponder the texts of his predecessors. Perhaps one day, one of them can even hold the highest written-word job in the land.

“My goal is to empower artists to have a conversation within an academic and scholarly setting that will help them validate their own art. We can do that,” says Ahanu.

“Artists can walk in those spaces that they didn’t feel like were open to them and articulate why they should be there.” s Eric Tullis lives in Chapel Hill, where he writes about music and basketball.

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Booking words

Raleigh’s Chris Tonelli gives the city its poetry presence, even if it can feel like a one-person mission

BY GRAYSON HAVER CURRIN

S

everal months passed before Charles Wilkes realized he might need to ask his business partner what would happen if the bookstore they had opened together never made any money.

In early 2013, Wilkes had just turned 30.

He had a steady income and was married without children. But Chris Tonelli— the other half of So & So Books, a little part-time shop in the storefront of an architecture studio on Raleigh’s revitalized Person Street—was at a different point in his life. A married homeowner and father of two, he was approaching 40.

“I wasn’t sure if we were on the same page,” remembers Wilkes. “We hadn’t talked about it at that level.”

In fact, So & So Books stemmed largely from conversational daydreams the two had shared about the possibility of a bookstore near downtown Raleigh, exchanges that friends at In Situ Studios overheard. They had extra space in their new office and could offer cheap, lowpressure rent for the right retail endeavor.

Tonelli and Wilkes accepted, invested what they could in bookshelves and a modest first purchase of inventory and never pursued the sort of extensive business planning a bank loan would require. When it became clear that their profit margin would mean perpetually breaking even, Wilkes worried Tonelli might not have time to stick around.

“How long would we do this if Chris wasn’t going to get paid for his time? I finally broached the subject, and I was reassured that he felt like we were offering a service,” says Wilkes, laughing in a way that suggests he’s still nervous about the numbers. “We felt like we played a role in helping the community exist.”

Tonelli had grown accustomed to such situations. As a poet, a poetry reading series impresario and the co-founder of a successful small poetry press, Tonelli has worked at the essential (if underpaid) edges of the literary world for more than a decade. He has been published in esteemed journals, has issued several chapbooks and a book and just finished his second full collection, and has read at high-profile institutions. He has turned his city’s contemporary art museum into its

only regular poetry hall, and he has almost singlehandedly supported Raleigh’s side of the Triangle poetry community. He has obtained grants so that his press, Birds, LLC, can help pay for its writers to travel, and he recruits writers from around the country to read in Raleigh in a series that stands out in part for its longevity and consistency. These days, he begins writing at 5 a.m. every morning before his children wake up and he goes to work in N.C. State’s libraries. And he has learned to do all this while getting paid for, well, most anything else.

Closing his sports coat against an early fall breeze at an outdoor bar table a few doors down from So & So Books, Tonelli recalls his first public poetry reading outside of graduate school at Boston’s Emerson College. He earned $200 for reading at New York’s New School, a sum that still flummoxes him.

“They paid me, which was a disaster because I thought, ‘Hell yeah, poetry readings! I’m going to make some money,’” says Tonelli, tilting his head so that his thick-rimmed glasses seem to hover above his grin. “I don’t think I’ve been paid since. I took a $5 Chinatown bus and made $200? Amazing.”

Tonelli had taken a slow, unexpected path to poetry. After moving to Raleigh from a small New Jersey town as a teenager, he attended N.C. State as a premed student. When he had the chance to graduate early, his father, a scientist, encouraged him to stay in school and

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study language, something few in his field understood. The analytical approach of the classes captivated him. He skipped medical school, later returned to N.C. State for a master’s degree in English, taught in the department and finally moved to Boston to attend Emerson. He had fallen hard for poetry—writing it, reading it, engaging in its unique community. His experience in New York told him he needed to present it, too.

People had responded to Tonelli’s writing just as he’d hoped, laughing at the right lines and listening attentively. In Boston, poetry readings almost exclusively featured the paragons of the literary world, descending from the heavens with their awards and bibliographies to offer a few words to those on campuses.

There weren’t many outlets for emerging authors or places for young writers like Tonelli to test new material. So he began making the trip to New York more often.

“It quickly got old and expensive—nights out in New York, coming back hungover on the Chinatown bus. It was like, ‘Let’s stay in town for a reading,’” he says. “So that’s when I started the reading series.”

That series—also named So and So, but with the formal conjunction—began in a small jazz space, for which Tonelli paid a pittance of rent. Word began to spread, and the room began to fill with writers eager for a chance to read and readers eager to hear their words. A reverse pipeline from New York to Boston even formed, with poets

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looking to get out of their own city.

After a successful first year, where people seemed eager to have a hometown poetry reading, the series relocated to an artist colony called The Distillery at the invitation of poet and current Harvard archivist Mary Walker Graham, who offered to print a broadside for each reading. The artists in the building would collaborate with the poets to create new works. After each season, Graham would bind and sew all of the broadsides together into ornate anthologies. Wide-eyed about the experience nearly a decade later, Tonelli still calls it one of the most exciting collaborations of his career.

When Tonelli and his wife, Allison, left Boston to return to Raleigh, the series had momentum. He quickly resumed So and So, hosting it for years in the coffee shop The Morning Times before relocating to CAM in 2014. Despite the city’s growth, Raleigh presented a problem familiar from Boston: Most of its poetry could be found on campus, delivered by poet laureates and award winners.

That is, without Tonelli. Seven years after the move, he presented the 90th edition of So and So in mid-November; considered as a whole, the series’ mix of academics and upstarts, touring and local writers represents a very current glimpse into modern poetry. Sometimes, low attendance tests his resolve, making him wonder if the series is necessary or if it’s the best use of his time. As with So & So Books, however, So and So the series remains his community contribution—something he must see in his city, even if it means doing it himself for no financial return or never really reading his own work in Raleigh.

“If there had been or even if it came up that there was another event to provide Raleigh with another poetry option, I wouldn’t necessarily feel compelled to continue So and So,” Tonelli says flatly and without pause. “I just want the place that I live and happen to like, when it’s an exciting time to be here, to have that option. It just doesn’t otherwise.”

Grayson Haver Currin is the INDY’s music editor. Email him at gcurrin@indyweek.com.

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THE HIGH DIVERS Debut album, “Riverlust” now available on

Itunes

Spotify

Bandcamp

“How lucky am I to have happened upon this?” (Give It Up, Track 3) “is easily one of the finest pure, rock ‘n’ roll tracks of the year” -Soundchips “Listening to the superbly crafted Riverlust, the debut LP by The High Divers, is a lot like coming across a long-lost favorite album.”

-Devin Grant, Charleston Magazine Winners of “Best Up & Coming Band 2015” for the Charleston City Paper Music Awards Upcoming dates The Music Farm November 28th, Charleston, SC with The Steppin Stones

www.thehighdivers.com

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Thu Nov 19 www.lincolntheatre.com NOVEMBER

We 18 KEVIN GATES 8p Th 19 THE EXPENDABLES Down by Five Fr 20 START MAKING SENSE 8p Sa 21 Sa 21 Su 22 We 25 Fr 27

A Tribute to THE TALKING HEADS JEANNE JOLLY w/Josh Moore 6:30 PULSE: (E.D.M.) Late Show 9p

CAPLETON & PROPHECY BAND THE MANTRAS 8p HOLY GHOST TENT REVIVAL 8p

w/ Rebekah Todd Sa 28 UP THE IRONS IRON MAIDEN trib w/Still The Night (WHITESNAKE trib)

The Expendables Fri Nov 20

Start Making Sense Talking Heads Tribute

Sat Nov 21 CD Release

DECEMBER

We 2 DEGREES NORTH Film presented

by THE NORTH FACE w/ Ralph

Th 3 Fr 4 Sa 5 Su 6 We 9 Th 10 Fr 11 Sa 12 We 16 Th 17 Fr 18 Sa 19 Su 27 Th 31 1-8&9 1-15 1-16 1-23 1-31 2 - 1 2-5&6 2-13 2-18 2-19 2-20 2-23 2-28 3 - 1 3 - 9 3-17 3-31 4 - 3

Backstom / Xavier De Le Rue + 7:30P

BIG DADDY LOVE/LOVE CANON THE STEELDRIVERS 8p KIX w/Automag /The Fifth + JOHN KADLECIK BAND 7p SAMANTHA FISH 7p CORROSION OF CONFORMITY DOPAPOD w/ Nth Power 8p OLD HABITS (Christmas Bash!!)

HOLIDAY RAWk 7p HOPE FOR HAITI w/People’s

Blues of Richmond/Peak City Blues REBEL SON w/Dave Schneider 8p YARN w/ The Dune Dogs 8p NANTUCKET w/special guest 7p BIG SOMETHING w/Groove Fetish ZOSO Ultimate LED ZEPPELIN exp STRUTTER (A Tribute to KISS) THE BREAKFAST CLUB 80’s 8p

ANI DIFRANCO GRAVEYARD w/Spiders 7p EPICA w/ Moonspell/Starkill 6:30 AMERICAN AQUARIUM 8p WHO’S BAD Michael Jackson Trib.

THE MACHINE performs PINK FLOYD MOTHER’S FINEST + 7p NEVER SHOUT NEVER + 6:30p SISTER HAZEL 7p MIKE GARDNER BENEFIT 7p Y&T 7p JUDAH AND THE LION 7p MAC SABBATH STICK FIGURE 7p THE INFAMOUS STRINGDUSTERS

Jeanne Jolly Sun Nov 22

Capleton Wed Nov 25

The Mantras Holy Ghost Tent Revival

Advance Tickets @Lincolntheatre.com & Schoolkids Records All Shows All Ages

126 E. Cabarrus St. 919-821-4111

Fri Nov 27

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INDYweek.com

STRENGTHENING SYSTEM Listening with Durham breakouts Wailin Storms to influences—obvious, unnoticed or inhaled Kevin Gates

BY CORBIE HILL

n the realm of urgent punk and sinister metal, you can’t assume any bandleader’s name is real. Think Glenn Danzig or Jello Biafra, Ozzy Osbourne or Abbath. But in the case of singer Justin Storms, it was the band Wailin Storms that borrowed his name.

“In Texas people called me Stormy,” says the Corpus Christi-raised Storms. After stints in Baltimore, Berlin, Switzerland and Brooklyn, where he began Wailin Storms in 2012, he landed in Durham in 2014 following a romance.

Soon after, he founded the band’s second iteration.

On an appropriately rainy November Monday, Storms and his bandmates settle into the living room of audiophile drummer Mark Oates. He sits closest to the sound system.

Bassist Steve Stanczyk speaks cheerfully and frequently about punk and metal, while guitarist Todd Warner measures his words. Despite the fury of his performances and the bravado of his music, Storms is calm and goodnatured, even a little soft-spoken.

A few weeks before the release of One Foot in the Flesh Grave via Magic Bullet Records, the members listened to and talked about their idols of guitar-driven rock.

SLEEP, “DOPESMOKER” (Drop out of life with/an hour to spare— dang, what a/long, slow, stoner jam) JUSTIN STORMS: People have definitely compared us to some stoner rock bands. I’ve gotten really high to this before. I love Sleep, a lot of stoner bands.

STEVE STANCZYK: The biggest thing with this kind of music is to be OK with playing one note. “Don’t Forget the Sun” is basically, we’re OK with playing four notes and letting it ring out. There is a lot of discipline that has to happen with just letting it vibrate your lungs.

NEUROSIS, “SOVEREIGN” (The lords of patient/philosophical metal/Do they ever smile?)

SS: This is closer to my heart than Sleep. I just learned how to play “Enemy of the Sun.” It’s the same tuning we play. I’ve just been fiddling around with it. I can’t tell you how many hours my roommate and I spent doing six-

foot bongs listening to Enemy of the Sun in our dorm room. We had PA speakers. We blew one.

JS: I love Neurosis. I grew up on Godflesh, and this is definitely reminiscent of Godflesh to me.

SS: You weren’t a fiend?

MO: While you guys were doing that, I was listening to Agent Orange and Dead Kennedys and Agnostic Front.

Misfits never fell into that category.

DEAD KENNEDYS, “HOLIDAY IN CAMBODIA” (These trebly, surfy/West Coast political punks/ have weird-ass vocals) SS: I’m surprised we don’t get compared to Dead Kennedys more, with the reverb-y guitar.

JS: I grew up on Dead Kennedys and I played in a punk band, and they are hyper-influential to me.

SS: No one ever says, “This band sounds like Dead Kennedys.” I think it’s because Biafra’s voice is so unique. Who sings like that?

NIRVANA, “IN BLOOM” (Seriously? You/need an introduction to/Nirvana? Nah, bud.)

MO: This video is probably one of my favorite videos of all time.

JS: It’s good. I do like “Heart-Shaped Box,” though.

He used actual film and then he colored it. It was in black and white.

INDY: I feel like this band’s cult overshadows how weird it was that a noisy band could be so popular.

JS: That was a strange phenomenon, but I guess it needed to happen. Music was so fucking horrible and shitty. I like Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston. I love Bell Biv DeVoe. But you need punk rock. You need danger.

You need something other than safe hair bands.

MO: I remember Nevermind knocking Michael Jackson off No. 1. And I was like, really? What the hell? I was lucky enough to hear Nirvana beforehand because of my brother.

TODD WARNER: I was really into music when I was a little kid, but by the late ’80s, I was really sick of everything going on, the hair metal bands and all that late-’80s shit. It wasn’t until Nirvana exploded that I realized that music doesn’t suck.

MISFITS, “WE ARE 138” (This horror-punk act/(Danzig’s voice, for sure) comes through/in Wailin Storms’ sound) JS: This is classic. When I was 15, my band back then, Fifth Column, a political punk band, we did Misfits tribute shows before the new Misfits came around. People liked the Misfits, but no one really liked punk back then. We brought punk to our city again, because punk had came and went.

MARK OATES: I wasn’t really enthralled with them.

TIMBER TIMBRE, “DEMON HOST” (Todd, the odd man out/chose menacingly tender/Canadian folk) TW: I love the simplicity of (the video). It’s just a dude, and then these black-hooded figures come out holding mics in front of him. There’s this sinister aspect.

JS: It’s menacing when he sings.

TW: It revolved around this guy. This is actually the first song on their first record. A friend of mine, I played one of their records for him in the car, to explain how not all of their records were like this. His description was perfect: “It’s like the Munsters meets doo-wop with John Waters on vocals.”

American Aquarium Fri & Sat &6 Wailin Storms: from left, Justin Feb Storms,5Steve Stanczyk, Todd Warner and Mark Oates

PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

• NOVEMBER 18, 2015 • music visual arts performance books film sports INDYweek.com

CHELSEA WOLFE, “MAW” (Steve picked a master/of brooding, spacious, folky/metal. We all cheered.)

SS: Before this album, I wasn’t familiar with her. The thing I enjoy the most is her ability to take things and ramp them up, and then go really quiet, where it’s haunting. Listen to the amount of space.

Those two guitar tones have so much reverb.

Obviously we don’t get this electronic, but that haunting-ness is something that I feel is kindred to what we’re doing.

TW: She played at Local 506 a couple of years ago, and she played a more strippeddown acoustic set. They had candles lit on stage and this acoustic trio. She can make anything work.

THE FLESH EATERS, “RIVER OF FEVER” (No surprise, Justin/wanted to hear an allstar/LA punk outfit) JS: This is members of The Gun Club, Divine Horsemen and X, I think. They’re a big influence of mine, one of the early

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LA punk bands. They’re talking about graveyards and dark shit, swamps. It’s dark and cryptic, like my writing.

INDY: It’s funny how inclusive “punk” can be—it’s the attitude, not necessarily the sound.

JS: We’re not this stripped down.

HOT SNAKES, “I HATE THE KIDS” (Mark’s pick, Hot Snakes, grooves/swings and drives—heavy hitters/but not ponderous) JS: Mark knows so many bands.

SS: He’s like the encyclopedia of bands.

MO: With our style of music, we have a groove and still maintain a punk aesthetic.

When I think of bands like that, Hot Snakes pops in.

JS: I don’t shy away from saying we’re punk at all. s Find Corbie Hill on Twitter: @ afraidofthebear.

WAILIN STORMS ONE FOOT IN THE FLESH GRAVE

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Wailin Storms keeps getting bigger.

In personnel and sound, the band has expanded with every release. Frontman Justin Storms, the outfit’s lone constant, started the project as a Southern Gothic duo, issuing the predictably spare if effectively moody Bone Colored Moon EP in 2012.

For 2014’s Shiver EP, Storms enlisted a drummer and bassist to fill in some of the negative space.

The crew infused his increasingly propulsive songs with a much-needed rumble, like Samhain casting shadows over The Gun Club. And finally, for the full-length debut, One Foot in the Flesh Grave, Storms has finished the job by relocating to Durham and expanding Wailin Storms into a proper quartet.

Storms, along with Bats & Mice drummer Mark Oates, lead guitarist Todd Warner and bassist Steve Stanczyk, gives these songs the heft they require. Scorching single “Ribcage Fireplace” bursts at the seams. Behind Storms’ raw howl, itself a perfect hybrid of Glenn Danzig and Murder City Devils’ Spencer Moody, Oates forces the band forward. Storms and Warner summon gusts of distortion and reverb while Stanczyk cuts clanging, low-end riffs through the din. It’s the sort of murky maelstrom The Men used to conjure and which Destruction Unit still does.

Even in quieter moments, Wailin Storms maintains an intense air of foreboding.

“Walk” opens with comparatively sparse guitar strumming and light drumming. Echoing Nick Cave’s steely menace, Storms sings, “See you walking down, down, down/With your hair always to the ground/Lips, lips, lips I wanna taste/Arms all around.”

Early on, Wailin Storms garnered surprising comparisons—Roy Orbison’s evocative rockabilly and the Birthday Party’s tense post-punk, Danzig’s dark blues metal and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ haunted hollers. Those contrasting influences still have their place, but One Foot’s roster allows for more dense arrangements and a more confident presentation. Wailin Storms feels like more than an exercise in duality now. At last, this band is ready to find an audience to grow alongside it.

—Bryan C. Reed

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POLE POSITION TALIB KWELI & 9TH WONDER INDIE 500 (Jamla Records/Javotti Media)

I

n September, Angel Diaz unloaded on the self-proclaimed real hip-hop fans. Writing for Complex Magazine in quasi-defense of Drake and Future’s What a Time To Be Alive mixtape, Diaz lampooned “old head, super lyrical motherfuckers,” or the subset of rap fans who believe hip-hop has lost its way.

“Can’t be listening to Talib Kweli rap off beat and Lupe Fiasco deep cuts at BBQs,” wrote Diaz. “Come on, don’t nobody wanna hear that shit all the fucking time.”

If you’ve ever grouped yourself in with the stubborn sect Diaz blasted, Indie 500—a new collaborative venture and compilation between Kweli, Durham producer 9th Wonder, their respective squads and an allstar cadre of friends—arrives just in time.

Diaz’s divisive BBQ theory has slid quickly down a slippery slope, prompting intelligent debate from independent hip-hop watchdogs like Kweli and 9th. They’ve both clapped back on social media and in interviews. Here, at last, they let the music provide the rejoinder.

Kweli and 9th last worked in close proximity on Little Brother’s 2007 album, Getback, as 9th was on his way out of the group. This reunion speaks more to crossbreeding than co-working, as Kweli lends his voice and the talent of his label, Javotti Media, to 9th’s Jamla Records squad and Soul Council production roster.

Kweli rhymes on almost every song here, but his lyrical contributions are understated; the four beats that 9th throws in aren’t his most glowing, either. The album, then, is an exercise in custodial synergy, where young rappers and producers are allowed to cross paths and find the sparks. There are several.

The agitated protest bars of the Nottzproduced “Which Side Are You On” allow Missouri rapper and activist Tef Poe to profess: “I don’t believe in no laws/I don’t believe in your god/It’s your block for my black freedom/Put a car bomb in your

heart.” And there are the imaginative word flurries of American-Brazilian rapper (and Kweli-championed) Niko Is, arriving over one of Khrysis’ slow, wrenched compositions for “Technicolor Easels.”

Niko Is also spars well with cunning Jamla emcee GQ on “King Shit,” and anchors in a gruff, convincing manner on “These Waters.”

While Indie 500 is to be applauded for its effort in creating a space to push the agendas of 9th Wonder and Talib Kweli (and their artists, from Rapsody and GQ to MK Asante and Niko Is), its true muscle comes from joining a continuum of independent rap hustle. The leaders recruited real architects for the project, including Brother Ali, Planet Asia and the third leg of their Indie 500 trinity, Pharoahe Monch. But perhaps no one summarizes Indie 500’s mission more than Slug of

Atmosphere, who, in 1995, co-founded one of the most successful independent rap labels ever, the Minnesota-based Rhymesayers Entertainment.

On “Prego,” his wisdom pierces: “If you were listening hard, then you’d be lifting your guard/Grew a couple fins, tried to swim with the sharks/The worth ain’t based on if the dogs chase it/Bark ’til you bargain yourself out of the basement.” With rhymes that celebratory, you’ll be able to stack your BBQ playlist with whatever you damn well please. —Eric Tullis

NOV 18 - DEC 12 Center for Dramatic Art, UNC-Chapel Hill

|

playmakersrep.org

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919.962.7529

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TIME (THE REVELATOR)

An appreciation of Dave Rawlings and Gillian Welch, who have never quite cashed in on the banjo wave they began

BY ALLISON HUSSEY in a methodical manner.

Many bands get locked into cycles that only end when they do, pumping out record after record that will likely make little money but pushing the band on the road with hopes of breaking big or at least recouping costs.

Like a singer-songwriter Bonnie and Clyde, busting you up and leaving you blindsided with their songs, Welch and Rawlings mostly tour.

Their beguiling, intimate stage show has sustained them, and they stop to record a new album only when the songs are ready. Fans waited eight years for Welch’s 2011 record The Harrow and the Harvest, the follow-up to 2003’s Soul Food, too, is forever: Rawlings and Welch Journey. Dave Rawlings Friend’s charming, casual jangle yields Machine released A to breathtaking clarity and welcome Friend of a Friend in 2009, six years ahead of shine. When soft strings breeze through September’s Nashville Obsolete.

“The Weekend” to add an extra layer of An interviewer recently asked Rawlings wistfulness, it’s the Sunday best version about the title of that new one, and his of his style. It’s fancy but not precious, a response was flippant but telling. Was it natural extension of what Rawlings and blatant commentary on the tumultuous Welch have long done. music industry? For Rawlings, that reading This uninterrupted, antique aesthetic is covered but “five percent” of the meaning. also apparent on the cover, an unsettling Instead, the title stemmed from another and hollow tintype. Rawlings, guitar joke about starting a mail-order catalog across his lap, sits to Welch’s left, with the business, Nashville Obsolete, to sell record’s other primary players standing outdated equipment like typewriter ribbons beside them: Old Crow Medicine Show and floppy disks. Rawlings did admit, co-founder Willie Watson to the left, though, that he feels the age of music as a Punch Brother Paul Kowert to the right. commodity has ended; now, it’s something You can barely make out anyone’s eyes. many people expect instantly and for free.

And as if to turn their ambivalence to Still, Welch and Rawlings persevere. A what’s hot and dates of origin into the joke Friend of a Friend was a wonderful Dave itself, Nashville Obsolete is available digitally Rawlings Machine record, featuring and on CD, not the au courant LP. You can original material and covers of Neil Young, get it on tape, too, a wink to the premise of Bright Eyes and Ryan Adams. While Rawlings’ future emporium of the past. those songs were thoughtful, Nashville But most of all, it’s the songs that make Obsolete is a full thought. A Friend of a PHOTO BY HENRY DILTZ

B

etween songs at a sold-out and reverently quiet performance at Durham’s Carolina Theatre last spring, the singer and songwriter Gillian Welch remembered an old joke.

A decade earlier, around the time O Brother, Where Art Thou? and its successful soundtrack emerged, she and partner Dave Rawlings—in Durham, standing to her right with his small-body guitar— had laughed that they would one day be forerunners of “the banjo wave,” bound to overtake popular music in five-string glory.

Wealth and fame would surely follow.

American folk music had fallen far from favor before the movie surprisingly helped reinvigorate America’s interest in its traditional tunes. By the time Welch and Rawlings reached Durham, the situation had, of course, changed. Mumford & Sons and The Avett Brothers were packing arenas as bona-fide rock stars, and humble acoustics appeared in unexpected places: behind electronica beats on pop hits, in new phases of soft indie rock, in late-night television slots and awards shows. The punch line had become reality.

Having made some of the best folk LPs of the past two decades, both under Welch’s name and as the Dave Rawlings Machine, Welch and Rawlings were some of this banjo wave’s true pioneers and prophets. Still, here they were, filling a room only a sliver of the size those contemporary derivatives would play.

Where was the money?

Not with Welch and Rawlings: During the last two decades, the pair has slowly made stunning records that feel like parts of an artistic whole, both current and timetested, as if they’d been made yesterday or a half-century ago. Together, Welch and Rawlings are an act whose success comes not just from sales but from the steady spread of their music, meaning they’re not underappreciated so much as underpaid relative to those they inspired. They never cashed in on a trend they helped launch; getting really famous had just been a funny joke, after all.

Rawlings and Welch have always operated

DAVE RAWLINGS MACHINE Sunday, Nov. 22, 7:30 p.m., $27.50–$39.50 DPAC, 123 Vivian St., Durham 919-680-2787, www.dpacnc.com

Nashville Obsolete transcend ideas of time and trends: “The Trip” recalls old Appalachian ballads in its 11-minute commitment to storytelling and suspect vignettes that include “a body, a handkerchief and a hatchet from an unspeakable crime.”

Likewise, “The Bodysnatchers” embraces the otherworldly spookiness of old-time music. These songs haven’t been squeezed into chart-ready suits.

Nashville Obsolete closes with “Pilgrim (You Can’t Go Home),” an eight-minute number that begins, “‘I won’t get drunk no more, no more,’/The old refrain, it shines with use.” It is the most direct song here, even as it philosophizes on loss and journeys. “Pilgrim” spins, eventually, to a repetitious end: “Keep rollin’ down that road you’re on.” The line is a hopeful sentiment that feels true to the tale of Rawlings and Welch—stay on course, even if it’s at least temporarily obsolete. s Find Allison Hussey: @allisonhussey.

photo journal

NIGHTTIME SCENES WHILE RUNNING THROUGH ALLEYS IN DURHAM. Photographs by Alex Boerner Top: from left, Redd Supreme, 18, Asha Hashim, 18, and Dee C. Smith, 21, all of Durham, stand for an impromptu portrait after they climbed up a fire escape in 26 Alley in downtown Durham.

Right: A man talks on the phone in the alley off Foster Street across from the Marriott hotel.

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BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

Room is a harrowing tale of captivity, escape and the dark heart of familial love BY RYAN VU

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mma Donoghue and Lenny Abrahamson’s ROOM, adapted from Donoghue’s acclaimed novel, is a cathartic exploration of the trauma at the heart of the love between mother and child. The horrific premise— that young mother Joy Newsome (Brie Larson) and her son, Jack (Jacob Tremblay), are prisoners in a psychopath’s shed—is kept in the background; Donoghue uses it to intensify uncomfortable emotions intrinsic to parenting and early childhood.

The first act is confined to “Room,” Jack and Joy’s name for their prison. The tiny, banal space is made alien by the way To reserve your ad To reserve your ad objects contact proper your ad rep or they give everyday rgierisch@ names: A table becomes Table, rgierisch@indyweek.com their bed, Bed. Jack’s reality is divided between TV, his physical experience and Outer Space, or everything beyond Room. Joy plays ROOM along until she can’t, and their eventual escape is a Matrix-like HHH 1/2 rewriting of Jack’s cosmos. Room’s Opening Friday continuing hold on them is filtered Room PHOTO COURTESY OF A24 FILMS through Jack’s amusing, often touching attempts to comprehend the change.

Elisabeth Fritzl, who was held captive by her One of Room’s more daring moves is to father in his cellar for 24 years, where she highlight how trauma can be deepened raised three of their seven children before through a parent’s efforts to protect her eventually escaping. child. After letting Jack believe Room is all Room is inspired by, not based on, the there is, Joy must shatter his illusions all at Fritzl story, but a few hanging threads from once. In her parents’ home, she struggles the source material beg to be tied. Keeping with Jack’s growing independence. The the captor incidental to the plot avoids pair’s performances in these wrenching cliché at the cost of making his behavior sequences deserve their Oscar buzz. seem inconsistent: If he’s such a monster, Danny Cohen’s cinematography ties why does he obey Joy’s demand that he us to Jack’s point of view via tight closenever even see his son? Why doesn’t he try ups, restricting spatial detail even outside harder to prevent their escape? of Room. This works well for scenes of We don’t know because Jack can’t. suspense and tragedy, grounding events The quasi-mythic quality his perception that would otherwise be hard to accept gives to the film suggests that in order to outside the genres of horror or melodrama. represent the unimaginable, we’re faced Unfortunately, an intrusive score won’t with the impossible task of making whole stop reminding us we’re watching an Indie worlds out of fragments. s Drama. While the narrative pacing is impeccable, key To moments would havead hadcontact your ad rep or reserve your Ryan Vu is a graduate student in the more impact with space to breathe.

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Underlying Room is the story of Austria’s

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BREAK THE NEWS

After revolutionizing TV by co-creating The Daily Show, Lizz Winstead still serves up timely satire BY CRAIG D. LINDSEY

O

ne wonders if comedian Lizz Winstead ever feels like Ice Cube, who once rapped, “I started this gangsta shit / And this the motherfuckin’ thanks I get?” But in Winstead’s case, replace “gangsta” with “fake news.”

Nearly 20 years ago, the Minneapolisborn comedian co-created The Daily Show with executive producer Madeleine Smithberg. After serving as head writer for a year and a half (she left after original anchor Craig Kilborn made some unflattering, sexually explicit remarks about her in an Esquire article), she conceived of the newssatire formula that, under Jon Stewart and, more recently, Trevor Noah, has made the show a household name and paved the way for the likes of Stephen Colbert, John Oliver and Seth Meyers.

Winstead, who performs stand-up at Cat’s Cradle this week, says she’s always been too busy to fret about when she’ll get props for basically coming up with the genre of anchor-desk mockery. Over the years, she has bounced from one highprofile project to another, from being a co-founder and an on-air personality at the now-defunct liberal talk station Air America Radio to serving as executive producer for Maury Povich and Connie Chung’s shortlived MSNBC weekend show.

She continues to thrive on hot-button satire. As founder of the nonprofit organization Lady Parts Justice, Winstead has recently been mocking politicians hostile to reproductive rights by launching Hinder, an app that is (of course!) a parody of Tinder. She assembled writers and comedians to round up the guiltiest culprits and their most ridiculous quotes.

“There was so much material coming out of the States about these people who have zero idea how the human body works, and all this weird legislation, that I wanted to be able to combine my humor and my advocacy around reproductive rights,” Winstead says.

With more than 30 years’ experience, Winstead still finds time to do stand-up across the country, gathering instances of local officials behaving badly to give her a constant stream of fresh topical material.

Expect her to go off on some Tar Heel villains when she comes here.

LIZZ WINSTEAD Lizz Winstead: “North Carolina is the most unsung story in how America is going.”

Friday, Nov. 20, 8:30 p.m., $20 Cat’s Cradle, 300 E. Main St., Carrboro 919-967-9053 www.catscradle.com

PHOTO COURTESTY OF LIZZWINSTEAD.COM

“I often say that North Carolina is the most unsung story in how America is going,” she says. “I will not only be talking about the rogues gallery we all know on a national level, but I also have some fun material about North Carolina politics as a whole.”

Winstead may have started this fake-news shit, but its longevity and contribution to American satire are thanks enough for her.

“The greatest gift I can get is when I watch The Daily Show and the format stays basically the same, to watch it carry on while different hosts put their spin on it, and I built the foundation,” she says. “It makes me feel great about my instincts about what people want to see.” s Craig D. Lindsey writes about comedy, film, TV and more. Twitter: @unclecrizzle

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BILL FRISELL

Where we’ll be

THE ARTSCENTER, CARRBORO | FRIDAY, NOV. 20

Staring at a stand of charts of songs in an NPR office in 2012, the guitarist Bill Frisell did what he so often does: He got charmingly geeky about songs and their structures, awestruck by how great they could be. “Music is a trip,” he said, looking down and hesitating as the audience laughed in his spell. “I’m 60 years old, and today is still the first day. The whole thing is in front of me.” Frisell then offered up a transfixing rendition of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” its sparkling melody refracting into a glorious kaleidoscope of harmony. These days, Frisell engages in a lot of big multimedia projects for arts spaces and the like, but it’s a joy just to revel in the sounds and songs he loves. He should have many chances to do just that on this trio tour date, where one of the most refined instrumentalists in the world puts his gilded tone in front of drummer Gerald Cleaver and bassist Tony Scherr. Get transfixed. 8 p.m., $32–$38, 300-G E. Main St, Carrboro, 919-929-2787, www.artscenterlive.org. —Grayson Haver Currin

CALENDARS MUSIC 33 VISUAL ARTS 37 PERFORMANCE 39 BOOKS 40 SPORTS 40 FILM 41

THEATER

PETER AND THE STARCATCHER

PLAYMAKERS REPERTORY COMPANY, CHAPEL HILL WEDNESDAY, NOV. 18–SATURDAY, DEC. 12

DANCE

Now that Pan has flown in and out of movie theaters faster than Peter Pan himself, take a look at another alternate origin for the Boy Who Never Grew Up in Peter and the Starcatcher. Based on Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson’s young adult novels, it’s a delightfully handmade production combining a minimum of actors, props and backdrops with a fast-moving, humorous adventure that provides big laughs without taking itself too seriously. The “origin” moment of Captain Hook gets guffaws with the repetition of three simple words for nearly five minutes. If you missed it when Broadway Series South staged it at Raleigh’s Memorial Auditorium in March, catch it now—it proves you can create a wondrous all-ages adventure using imagination more than spectacle, something the makers of Pan no doubt learned the hard way. 7:30 p.m. Tues.–Sat. (except Nov. 26 and Dec. 8–9); 2 p.m. Sun. (and Nov. 28), $15–$54, 150 Country Club Road, Chapel Hill, 919-962-7529, www.playmakersrep.org. —Zack Smith

EURYDICE DESCENDED

CORDOBA CENTER FOR THE ARTS, DURHAM FRIDAY, NOV. 20–SATURDAY, NOV. 21

MUSIC

LOCAL BAND LOCAL BEER

TIR NA NOG, RALEIGH | THURSDAY, NOV. 19

In 2007, Raleigh needed another stage for local music. The sheetrock walls and shin-high stage of Kings—an area anchor on McDowell Street—had just been destroyed during a debauched final night so that the building could be demolished for the construction of a parking deck. So Tir Na Nog employee Chris Tamplin pitched his boss on a partnership with N.C. State’s WKNC-FM that would pair free shows by local bands with cheap beers from local brewers. In the subsequent eight years, Local Band Local Beer has changed booking hands but stayed at the same Irish pub, giving both established acts and upstarts a place to play with a built-in audience. Tir Na Nog will close with its own bacchanal on Sunday, following 18 years in one spot. Before the end, though, and before Local Band Local Beer relocates to The Pour House, three fine bands raise a final toast to a bar named for a land of Irish wonder. Jon Lindsay, a recent Raleigh transplant from Charlotte, is a true pop chameleon, able to add accents of folk and soul, electro and rock in an instant. Brett Harris brings a proverbially cool verve to his own elegant songs, themselves careful reflections constructed with a thoughtful harmonic vocabulary. And Amigo shambles up from Charlotte, bringing thoughts of Dr. Dog and Badfinger, The Byrds and Wilco with each rollicking number. 9:30 p.m., free, 218 S. Blount St., Raleigh, 919-833-7795, www.tnnirishpub.com.

—Grayson Haver Currin

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MUSIC

11.18–11.25

JEANNE JOLLY

MUSIC

JEANNE JOLLY, JOSH MOORE

LINCOLN THEATRE, RALEIGH | SATURDAY, NOV. 21

On last month’s A Place to Run, Raleigh native Jeanne Jolly struck a difficult balance between her past and present interests. A classically trained vocalist who once toured alongside Chris Botti, she subsequently collaborated with R&B explorers The Foreign Exchange. And now, she’s embracing twang as a burgeoning singer-songwriter. Jolly’s voice soars through a wondrous range on these perfectly accented hybrids of country, soul and soft rock, smartly shaped by producer Chris Boerner. Former Beloved leader Josh Moore turned a similar trick earlier this year on his gorgeous debut, Parted Ways. After a hard-rock, hard-living past, Moore sings of spirituality and sobriety with sincerity over tunes that mingle fragile folk and heartland rock with traces of gospel.

Perhaps Jolly and Moore will join forces for a song or two here.

Interested in hearing Jolly in a totally different setting? She’ll be a featured soprano for the North Carolina Symphony’s holiday matinee concert Wednesday, Nov. 25, too. 7 p.m., $15, 126 E. Cabarrus St., Raleigh, 919-821-4111, www.lincolntheatre.com. —Spencer Griffith

PHOTO BY BRUCE DEBOER

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Choreographer Jessi Knight and her sister, director and poet Christina Knight, had been processing the death of their father when Christina dreamed of waking up in the City of the Dead. “She said it looked a lot like Brooklyn, where she was living at the time,” Jessi recalls. Both were considering the nature of tragedy, and both were nearing the end of long-term relationships, re-examining their understandings of love. They sought insight in a number of myths, and Eurydice spoke most directly to them. “She’s the object of Orpheus’ love and devotion,” Knight notes, “but she gets consumed by it. When she dies, he assumes it’s within his right and duty to go retrieve her from the Underworld. She’s so marginalized in her own story.” In this first dance-theater work from their new company, Knightworks, 11 performers cross Haitian funereal imagery with house music and drag culture, propelling Eurydice on an odyssey of her own. 8 p.m., $10–$12, 923 Franklin St., Durham, 919-414-9659, www.knightworksdancetheater.org. —Byron Woods

FILM

CARRBORO FILM FESTIVAL

THE ARTSCENTER, CARRBORO SATURDAY, NOV. 21–SUNDAY, NOV. 22

Now in its 10th year, the Carrboro Film Festival has grown in its reach while maintaining its tradition of showing short works, mostly by area filmmakers, which vary widely in tone, genre, length and approach. Sharing screen space over two days are films ranging from The Last Barn Dance, a documentary about an Alamance County milk farmer trying to preserve both a family tradition and his livelihood, and Birthday, the fictional story of a young wife re-encountering her wounded Marine husband.

There’s also lighter fare, like the twisted fantasy-romance “American Sock.” In addition to screening 32 films, the festival offers workshops, such as one by director Rob Underhill on how to navigate film festivals. That may be a little too insider-ish for the lay attendee, but on Saturday night, acclaimed film editor Michael R. Miller, one of two guest speakers, will drop stories about working with Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen and the Coen brothers. 10 a.m.–9 p.m. Sat.; 12:45–7:30 p.m. Sun., $15–$20, 300 E. Main St., Carrboro, www.carrborofilmfestival.com. —David Klein

INDYweek.com

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NOVEMBER 18, 2015

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music WED, NOV 18

THE ARTSCENTER: Minas; 8 p.m., $12–$18. See indyweek. com.

CAROLINA THEATRE: Frank Sinatra Jr.; 8 p.m., $47–$185. See indyweek.com.

CAT’S CRADLE (BACK ROOM): David Wax Museum; 8 p.m., $12. See indyweek.com.

DUKE COFFEEHOUSE FLORIST Emily Sprague’s Florist deals in the kind of sweet, confessional anti-folk currently trending in DIY music circles. Similar to her comrades in Eskimeaux, these songs value spare arrangements and modest vocals. Underneath the twee exterior, a world of rich imagery and knotty emotion is at work. Philly’s Hello Shark opens. His plaintive lo-fi tunes are precious and world-weary, as if Owen Ashworth ditched the keyboards and made a guitar record. $5/9 p.m. —DS KINGS: Nobunny, Flesh Wounds; 8:30 p.m., $10–$12. See indyweek.com.

LINCOLN THEATRE: Kevin Gates; 9 p.m., $25. See indyweek.com.

LOCAL 506: Beat Connection, Phantoms; 9 p.m., $8–$10.

NEPTUNES PARLOUR: U.S. Girls, Nest Egg, Bodykit; 9:30 p.m., $7. See indyweek.com.

THE PINHOOK SHANA FALANA A few hours north of Beach House in Baltimore, Kingston, New York’s Shana Falana deploys similar tricks in psychedelic dream pop. Guitar chords are looped and layered beneath Contributors Jim Allen (JA), Grant Britt (GB), Grayson Haver Currin (GC), Spencer Griffith (SG), Allison Hussey (AH), David Klein (DK), Jeff Klingman (JK), Jordan Lawrence (JL), Karlie Justus Marlowe (KM), Bryan C. Reed (BCR), Dan Ruccia (DR), David Ford Smith (DS), Eric Tullis (ET), Chris Vitiello (CV), Patrick Wall (PW)

INDYweek.com

DEEP SOUTH FREE AGENT JASUN

walls of fuzz and reverb. Drums echo as if recorded deep within Krubera Cave. Crisp, single-note melodies and tissue-thin vocals cut through it all. Local openers WOOL and Jphono1 make for a good pairing. $7/9 p.m. —PW POUR HOUSE: Archnemesis, Thumper; 9:30 p.m., $5. See indyweek.com.

SLIM’S AKRIS Earlier this month, the mid-Atlantic doom crew Akris released four new songs, packaged together as Fall. While Akris has been a band for almost a decade, the EP is something of a debut.

In April, Akris announced its next lineup, with a new drummer and guitarist Paul Cogle expanding the band, for the first time, to a trio. Fall’s nuanced and belligerent psych brims with energy and ambition. With Squall and Plow. $5/9 p.m. —BCR UNC’S MEMORIAL HALL: UNC Symphony Orchestra; 7:30 p.m., $5–$10.

THU, NOV 19 GREYHOUNDS THE ARTSCENTER For nearly 20 years, guitarist Andrew Trube and keyboardist Anthony Farrell have been writing and playing together.

They’ve penned songs for Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi and logged time in JJ Grey’s Mofro outfit. As Greyhounds, the duo bridges Memphis soul with Texas grit, more ZZ Top than Jimmie Vaughan. Trube’s songs tremble with energy; Farrell’s tunes, the duo’s strongest, simmer seductively. $12–$18/8 p.m. —PW CAROLINA THEATRE: Brian Wilson, Al Jardine; 8 p.m., $57– $256. See box, this page.

CAT’S CRADLE (BACK ROOM) ECHO COURTS, MIDNIGHT PLUS ONE Echo Courts and Midnight Plus One both love reverb, but what they do beneath that veneer differs greatly. The first, hailing from Greensboro, offers up contemplative pop-rock with a steady pulse. The second, from

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Carrboro, forces ragged punk energy through shoegaze textures.

With Flash Car. $7/10 p.m. —JL

BRIAN WILSON

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE CAROLINA THEATRE

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BRIAN WILSON | THURSDAY, NOV. 19 CAROLINA THEATRE, DURHAM—Genius, icon, rock’s George Gershwin, author of the greatest song ever written: the superlatives reserved for Brian Wilson are impressive even for superlatives. While the musical imagination of the Beach Boys’ primary songwriter captivates serious composers, the simple thrills of his songs are a rare point of agreement among the high-minded and not so high-minded.

The Beach Boys’ 1966 masterpiece, Pet Sounds, is often held up as the greatest evidence of Wilson’s brilliance. But almost from the start, the evidence of a unique talent was clear. After hearing the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” and pulling his car to the side of the road because he couldn’t believe what he was hearing, Wilson responded with “Don’t Worry Baby.” In faithfully emulating Phil Spector’s signature sound, he demonstrated songwriting and production mastery. But he took the clarion harmonies that were the Beach Boys’ trademark and turned them wistful and replaced visions of youthful hedonism with beguiling, almost unbearable intimacy.

Another pre-Pet Sounds moment is telling: In late 1964, the Beach Boys had an unlikely Top 10 hit called “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man).” The song represents another musical leap by using many of the unorthodoxies that Wilson would later encode into the pop songbook—dissonance, baroque chord choices, unstylized expressions of youthful anxiety. It also presents a sharp contrast with the other great writers of the moment. As 1965 loomed, Dylan was ready to reinvent himself electrically.

The Beatles were on the verge of recording “Ticket to Ride,” a giant sonic step away from their early sound. While also making audacious musical progress, Wilson was still more of a kid, yearning to escape the pull of his domineering father.

From this vantage, his evolution in the next two years is even more remarkable. By 1967, he’d written the aforementioned masterpiece, quit touring with the Beach Boys and spent six months painstakingly assembling “Good Vibrations,” his “pocket symphony.” Then he broke down. The extent of Wilson’s well-documented struggles snowballed, derailing him for the better part of two decades and making his eventual recovery that much more redemptive. In a month that has seen the passing of another musical king, Allen Toussaint, Wilson’s return reminds us of the gift we have in his continued presence and vitality. 8 p.m. $57– $256, 309 W. Morgan St., Durham, 919-560-3030, www.carolinatheatre.org. —David Klein

Durham’s Free Agent Jasun has resurfaced after last year’s The FreEP failed to live up to the promise of 2012’s 919s & Headaches, meant to be a local ode to Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak.

It almost hit the mark. Then two of his comrades, of the oncebubbling Bull City rap duo WreckN-Crew, relocated to Atlanta.

Free Agent’s reset button hasn’t been too friendly in his buddies’ absence. Hopefully, this show changes the headaches and heartbreaks. Ciroc Pop, Bubsy Millions, Precyce Politix open; Samson hosts, with K-Hill on DJ duty. $5/10 p.m. —ET

DURHAM PERFORMING ARTS CENTER JASON ISBELL Even when Jason Isbell was still with the Drive-By Truckers, it was already obvious he had something special. He didn’t start turning out big batches of brilliant songs straight out of the gate solo, but he grew up in public quickly. The consensus is that he reached full maturity with Southeastern, an album that will probably be invoked in hushed tones by upstart songwriters 20 years from now.

His latest, Something More Than Free, doubles down on intensity and power. With Anderson East. $39.50–$45/8 p.m. —JA

HAW RIVER BALLROOM THE WOOD BROTHERS A decade after the debut with Live at Tonic, The Wood Brothers’ mix of blues, folk, jazz and soul now fits nicely into the ballooning Americana label, a trendy catchall for sophisticated acoustic groups. The trio continues to expand musically on its new Paradise, with bassist Chris Wood finally playing electric. $22–$25/8 p.m. —KM

KINGS FUTUREBIRDS With song titles like “Rodeo,” “Virginia Slims” and “American Cowboy,” Georgia’s Futurebirds want to channel the broad, archetypal Americana of mainstream country radio. But their records are more modest, dominated by quiet harmonies and tasteful pedal steel. Hotel Parties details life on the road as a workingman’s band. Susto opens. $12–$14/8:30 p.m. —JK

NOVEMBER 18, 2015

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LINCOLN THEATRE THE EXPENDABLES With no relation to the movie franchise featuring aging action stars, The Expendables largely trade in the laid-back grooves one would expect from a chilled out group of California surfer dudes. While never matching the level of explosiveness brought

by Stallone and company, the quartet isn’t completely devoid of life. They occasionally spike the energy through ska and pop-punk. Down By Five opens. $17/9 p.m. —SG

NEPTUNES PARLOUR NAPOLEON WRIGHT II Will Napoleon Wright II ever be able to top his addictive ballad from a few years ago, “You Are the Sun”? He came close on 2013’s The Napoleon Complex with the Bobby Caldwell-inspired love song “What I Need.” By now he should know that his bread and butter is the hip-hop-friendly slow jam. $5/9:30 p.m. —ET

THE PINHOOK MADE OF OAK Made of Oak is the solo electronic handle of Sylvan Esso’s Nick Sanborn, the production half of the ascendant pop duo Sylvan Esso. The project’s new five-song debut, Penumbra, is a pleasant, discursive romp through granulated static and florid dance-floor melodies, gentle drifts and EDM-informed explosions. The record’s release party starts with the similarly framed Tuskha, the lithe digital guise of Phil Moore, the co-founder of folk duo Bowerbirds. $15/9 p.m. —GC POUR HOUSE: Turkuaz, The Fritz; 8 p.m., $10–$12.

SLIM’S: The Head, Absent Lovers; 9 p.m., $5.

THE SHED JAZZ CLUB: Acid Soul; 6 p.m., $5.

TIR NA NOG: Local Band, Local Beer: Jon Lindsay Band, Brett Harris, Amigo; 9:30 p.m., free.

See page 31.

FRI, NOV 20 THE ARTSCENTER: Bill Frisell; 8 p.m., $32–$38. See page 31.

BEYÙ CAFFÈ TAMISHA WADEN November will go down as a busy month for Durham singer Tamisha Waden. By the end of it, she will have performed at The Pour House, Duke University, The Palace International and at Cat’s Cradle as a member of The Foreign Exchange. But her “Truce”

INDYweek.com duet with Phonte Coleman on TFE’s Tales From the Land of Milk and Honey is only a teaser for some of the jazz- and soul-filled purging she’ll put on during tonight’s two performances. $10/8 & 10 p.m. —ET CAT’S CRADLE: Lizz Winstead; 8:30 p.m., $20.

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You have to hand it to former YouTube stars Turquoise Jeep: Where other late-’00s viral sensations have petered out, the Jeep have toured assiduously the last few years, flaunting their fun, ridiculous brand of R&B. It’s hard not to giggle at low-budget anthems like “Lemme Smang It” and “Taste You Like Yogurt.” But like many Internet-bred musical comedy acts, their shtick toes the line between lovable and tiresome. Still, there are worse ways to spend a Friday night.

With Juan Huevos and Kosha Dillz. $13–$15/9 p.m. —DS THE CAVE: Evan Baker, S.E. Ward, Elijah J. Yetter Bowman, Emma Lee Nelson; 9 p.m., $5.

DEEP SOUTH: Bloody Sabbath, Piece of Time; 9 p.m., $8.

DUKE’S BALDWIN AUDITORIUM DJEMBE & AFRO-CUBAN ENSEMBLES This annual fall concert includes performances from the Duke Djembe Ensemble and the Duke Afro-Cuban Ensemble, featuring students under the direction of veteran percussionist and lecturer Bradley Simmons. The pair of percussion troupes—the former focused on the storytelling rhythms of the traditional West African instrument—join guest performer Monti Ellison, another seasoned educator and composer who has played alongside Harry Belafonte and Lonnie Liston Smith. Free/8 p.m. —SG

DURHAM PERFORMING ARTS CENTER FRANKIE VALLI & THE FOUR SEASONS Anyone tempted to shrug off Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons as purveyors of lightweight rock would be wise to cue up “The Night.” This 1972 single from the band’s brief tenure on Motown Records features stunning vocals and a lapel-grabbing bass line that might inspire a reconsideration of the band’s legacy and a killer string of singles that began with “Sherry.” Tonight, you’ll likely hear the hits. “The Night”?

• NOVEMBER 18, 2015 •

Doubtful. $65–$130/8 p.m. —DK

KINGS MAGICIAN’S HAND PRACTICE Eccentric locals Magician’s Hand Practice have a penchant for the extreme. They refer to their live performances as “practices” and generally attempt to be your worst nightmare. The music explores improvisation, with squelching guitars and sound shrapnel flying in every direction. This show celebrates the release of a MHP T-shirt, presumably soaked in blood. $5/10 p.m. —DS

LOCAL 506 PATOIS COUNSELORS Patois Counselors have quickly blossomed into an idiosyncratic post-punk band with boundless momentum. After coalescing in January, the band released a sixsong EP in August and already has another 7-inch and an LP in the queue for 2016. The productivity shouldn’t be surprising, given leader Bo White’s steady stream of inspired releases, or his bandmates’ solid résumés.

But the real key is the fusion of forceful punk drumming, spartan guitars, grinding synths and deadpan vocals. “I wanted to blister some paint off the walls but do it in an anti-macho, smartass way,” White has said.

And so he did. With Human Pippi Armstrong, Natural Causes and Drag Sounds. $8/9 p.m. —BCR

MEYMANDI CONCERT HALL N.C. SYMPHONY: RACHMANINOFF’S SYMPHONY NO. 2 After dabbling with the contemporary during its last few concerts, the North Carolina Symphony returns to well-trodden Russian late romanticism with a pair of works written in the first decade of the 20th century. Concertmaster Brian Reagin starts the program with the warm melodies of Alexander Glazunov’s violin concerto from 1904. In the second half, the orchestra tackles Sergei Rachmaninoff’s massive second symphony. The work develops a fairly simple motif over the course of an hour of lush orchestral colors and soaring melodies. $18–$75/8 p.m. —DR

MOTORCO JESSICA LEA MAYFIELD These days, Jessica Lea Mayfield does what she wants. She still exists at the fringes of alt-country, but she’s bent away from the

34

roots of her past, pushing into grimy blues confessionals and grungy rock. Her Rust Belt croon remains beguiling, as do her incisive lyrics. Greensboro’s Lowland Hum opens with intimate, unhurried folk that explores emotional burdens. $15/9 p.m.

—PW

THE PINHOOK ILLEGAL DANCE PARTY Before self-acclaimed New Jersey “Club Kween” UNiiQU3 teamed up with Fool’s Gold Records’ Brenmar for the fun and instructional “Hula Hoop” single, there was nothing enjoyable about creepy Hula-Hoops in club. “Swing them hips round and round,” chants 25-year-old Cherise Gary, who’s just as adept at making these anthems as she is at spinning them inside DJ sets.

This one could give Illegal some spunk. GRRL, Queen Plz, and Sup Doodle open. $10–$12/10 p.m. —ET POUR HOUSE: Signal Fire, Jah Works; 9 p.m., $7–$10.

SOUTHLAND BALLROOM: Larry Keel, Dangermuffin, Hot Buttered Grits; 7 p.m., $17–$20.

UNC’S MEMORIAL HALL COODER-WHITE-SKAGGS When you put Ry Cooder and Ricky Skaggs on the same stage, you’re talking a lot of roots music power. Both of these guys have forgotten more than most other players will ever know about American roots styles, and when they start digging into their deep well of knowledge and batting blues, bluegrass, country and folk tunes back and forth, that’s the place you want to be.

Keeping it all in the family, the third member of the trio is Sharon White, the lead singer of long-lived bluegrass/country group The Whites and Skaggs’ wife. Cooder’s son, Joachim, joins on drums. $10–$69/8 p.m.

—JA

SAT, NOV 21 BERKELEY CAFÉ: Jeff Mullins: Patty Hurst Shifter’s Beestinger Lullabies; 7 p.m., free.

BEYÙ CAFFÈ TI HARMON Durham has become a hotbed for the fusion of jazz, soul and R&B. Vocalist and songwriter Ti Harmon adds a shot of Woody Guthrie to that cocktail in two Beyù sets. A graduate student in the N.C. Central jazz studies program, Harmon has already cut two albums and garnered

INDYweek.com praise for her arrangements of work and country songs. $8/8 & 10 p.m. —CV THE CARY THEATER: Carl Palmer’s ELP Legacy; 8 p.m., $19–$99.

CAT’S CRADLE THE BLUEGRASS BALL Intended to re-create the feeling of a festival jam, The Bluegrass Ball teams the Travelin’ McCourys with mandolinist Drew Emmitt and banjo player Andy Thorn, both of Colorado’s Cajunflavored Leftover Salmon. Fueled by the McCourys’ world-class picking, which blends traditional upbringing with a progressive mind-set, expect a loose set that won’t be confined to the bluegrass songbook. Wisconsin’s Horseshoes & Hand Grenades open with the kind of unhinged string-band throwdowns the quintet’s name suggests. $20–$23/8:30 p.m. —SG

CAT’S CRADLE (BACK ROOM) DRIFTWOOD “The Sun’s Going Down,” from Driftwood’s 2013 self-titled debut, is a charming folk-informed number that blends familiar acoustic tones with bold piano licks and unexpected tempo changes. The New York outfit is a refreshing addition to the humdrum lot of contemporary folksters. $12–$14/8 p.m. —AH THE CAVE: Joshua Starmer & the Starmakers, Drowning Lovers; 9 p.m., $5.

DEEP SOUT DAPPER CONSPIRACY The Dapper Conspiracy lives up to its name. Its smooth-as-silk approach to Southern rock feels like an attempt at classiness, though that holds the band back a bit during its darker, bluesier moments. Still, the more mellow jams are hard to resist. The Rinaldi Flying Circus is wilder, veering through gothic blues moods with a sense of chaotic adventure. With Season and Snare. $5/9 p.m. —JL

DUKE’S BALDWIN AUDITORIUM THE KING’S SINGERS The range and inventiveness of the King’s Singers never ceases to amaze. For this concert, titled “Pater Noster,” the vocal sextet explores different settings of the Lord’s Prayer from plainchant to the styles of recent decades.

The core of the program is unsurprisingly English, with set-

tings by the well-known (Byrd, Purcell, Gibbons, Tavener) and the obscure (William Harris, Bob Chilcott, Charles Wood, William Harris). They also take forays to the Americas, Estonia, the Netherlands, France, Germany and wherever you place Stravinsky in the 1920s. Expect some intriguing parallels and juxtapositions. $10–$52/8 p.m. —DR

DURHAM PERFORMING ARTS CENTER QDR COUNTRY FOR KIDS Despite the shared ampersand, OGs Big & Rich and newcomers Maddie & Tae make for very different country duos. The brash “Big Kenny” Alphin and John Rich (of “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy” infamy) aren’t much for subtlety, while Madison Marlow and Taylor Dye’s slyly winking “Girl in a Country Song” is one of the year’s best singles. The foursome teams up with local son Jason Michael Carroll and Mickey Guyton to raise money for the UNC Children’s organization. $20–$50/7 p.m. —KM

KINGS DEEP SLEEPER When your tools are rigid beats, droning synths and a wispy voice, it’s hard to make engaging electro-pop. But Tim Lemuel’s Deep Sleeper succeeds. The textures around the beats cleverly undulate, and those synths cut through at angles meant to keep the audience on edge. $7/9:30 p.m. —JL LINCOLN THEATRE: Jeanne Jolly, Josh Moore; 7 p.m., $15.

See page 31.

LINCOLN THEATRE PULSE ELECTRONIC DANCE PARTY What’s on deck for your Thanksgiving week? Reuniting with the family? Black Friday shopping? You could don a furry suit and head to this month’s Pulse party, branded as the “Furry Masquerave.” Revelers are advised to wear their finest animal costumes. A full roster of local EDM talent soundtracks this Dionysian affair. Let us know how explaining this one at Thanksgiving dinner goes. $13–$15/9 p.m. —DS LOCAL 506: Junior Astronomers; 9 p.m., $10.

THE MAYWOOD CASTLE This bill shows just how far bands can move from a doom metal foundation. San Francisco’s

Castle likes the low and slow, but the group folds arching melodies into its brooding sound, too, the tension producing the frisson of first-class classic metal.

Meanwhile, local and regional openers Bedowyn and Irata— both responsible for excellent LPs this year—embrace faded stoner impulses, but they massage thrash, post-rock and much more into the mix, too. Both bands offer more surprises than their countenances may initially suggest. With Caustic Casanova. $8–$10/8:30 p.m. —GC

WE 11/18

TH 11/19

MEYMANDI CONCERT HALL: N.C. Symphony: Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2; 8 p.m., $18– $75. See Nov. 20 listing.

FR 11/20

MOTORCO FRONTIER RUCKUS

SA 11/21

Motorco double dips today, offering two shows in one day. At 2 p.m., the Triangle’s own Magnolia Collective begin this so-called “Bloody Brunch,” with Detroit’s Frontier Ruckus headlining. The latter once offered more on outright folk-pop, but on last year’s Sitcom Afterlife, Frontier Ruckus sound more like a regular ol’ indie rock band. At the band’s best, synth and horn accents mix with surfy-sweet guitar riffs.

None of these songs hit all that hard, but perhaps that’s just as well if you’re looking for something to help lift that hangover fog. $8–$10/2 p.m. —AH

NIGHTLIGHT LIQUID ASSET This five-act bill travels all over the map. On the local end, there’s the cold, unrelenting techno of Carrboro’s Liquid Asset and the crrossover stoner rock of Durham’s new Bad Friends. On the touring end, San Fran’s Hot Tears brings one-woman metal soundscapes, by playing kick drums, guitar and bells at once.

With Swarm and Reflex Arc. $7/9:30 p.m. —DS

WE 11/18 TH 11/19 FR 11/20 SA 11/21 SU 11/22

NOVEMBER 18, 2015

DAGMAR BUMPERS CAROLINA LIGHTNIN’ DUKE STREET DOGS BYRON PAUL BAND THE JOSH PRESLAR BAND BO LANKENAU & FRIENDS

TRANSACTORS IMPROV:

SA 11/21SU 11/22

SA 12/5

MOTORCO DRIVIN N CRYIN Atlanta’s Drivin N Cryin first popped up in the mid-’80s, handily proving that alt rock could have a Southern slant without an Athens jangle. Since then, the band’s, well, driving force, Kevin Kinney, has kept the faith. The string of EPs Kinney has been unleashing over the last few years have been among his most impressive outings to date, encompassing everything from ’60s-influenced psychedelia to rip-roaring roots rock. Aaron Lee Tasjan opens. $15–$19/9 p.m. —JA

MINAS (BRAZILIAN/AMERICANA) GREYHOUNDS (MEMPHIS SOUL/FUNK) BILL FRISELL (AVANTE-GARDE/JAZZ)

•

SU 12/6

FOR FAMILIES! CARRBORO FILM FESTIVAL ELF FAIR HOLIDAY CRAFT MARKET CLAIRE LYNCH BAND

HOLIDAY SHOW FR 12/11

TH 12/17

FLASH CHORUS ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL “MERRY TEXAS CHRISTMAS Y’ALL!”

Gift Certificates available for the holidays!

Find out More at

www.ArtsCenterLive.org 300-G East Main St. Carrboro, NC Find us on Social Media

@ArtsCenterLive

The INDY’s Guide to Dining in the Triangle

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8PM 7PM 6-8PM 9PM $6 8PM $8

THE PINHOOK HERE WE GO MAGIC Brooklyn songwriter Luke Temple has led the ornate indie rock band Here We Go Magic since 2008. The music is hushed, yet fussy, a lot of complicated strokes uneasily trying to convey intimacy. They earned big-time admirers like Radiohead guru Nigel Godrich, who produced 2012’s A Different Ship, but they never quite broke through to the wider public. Last month the band released its fourth full-length album, Be Small, a committed take on records by ’70s studio nerds like Brian Eno. With Big Thief and Eric and Erica. $10–$12/9 p.m. —JK

PLAN B MEL MELTON & THE WICKED MOJOS In 1969, Gastonia native Mel Melton moved to Louisiana. He hooked up with slide guitarist Sonny Landreth, played with Clifton Chenier and started a band, Bayou Rhythm, with Sonny and Clifton’s son C.J. He and Landreth co-wrote “Congo Square,” recorded by John Mayall and the Neville Brothers.

Melton also became a prizewinning chef and still serves up Louisiana fare at his shows with his band, the Wicked Mojos. $7/10 p.m. —GB

POUR HOUSE JONATHAN SCALES FOURCHESTRA Asheville’s Jonathan Scales seems to overflow with inventive, avant-garde instrumental ideas. They elevate his steel pan playing beyond the novelty with which it’s often associated.

Scales’ Fourchestra bandmates go toe-to-toe with his talent and help realize his vision in crafting innovative compositions and creative improvisations.

Together, they blur jazz, funk and Caribbean sounds. $8–$10/9:30 p.m. —SG

THE RITZ ELI YOUNG BAND The Texas boys of the Eli Young Band have worked at a delicate balancing act since debuting in 2002. Though nobody would ever dream of calling them alt-country, they’ve got enough rock to keep from veering all the way into the kind of full-on pop-with-steel-guitar sound of fellow chart denizens. That’s not to say they’re above busting out a larger-than-life power ballad, but in the battle between the country mainstream and the grittier path, they’ve managed to

remain remarkably centrist. With Dallas Smith, Blackjack Billy and Abi Ann. $23/8 p.m. —JA

SUN, NOV 22 CAROLINA THEATRE BRANFORD MARSALIS No jazz musician has jumped the cultural rails like saxophonist, bandleader and Durham resident Branford Marsalis. It’s not just that he’s played with everybody—he led The Tonight Show Band for Jay Leno, acted in Spike Lee movies and helped found The Musicians Village for players displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

Now he lends his name and horn to a benefit concert for the acclaimed North Carolina Central University jazz studies program, taking the Carolina Theatre stage with pianist and frequent collaborator Joey Calderazzo, the NCCU Jazz Ensemble and the NCCU Vocal Jazz Ensemble.

A percentage of the ticket price counts as a tax-deductible contribution, and premium tickets get you into a special reception. $50–$250/6 p.m. —CV

CAT’S CRADLE (BACK ROOM) GIVERS Louisiana’s Givers make saccharine faux-exotic indie pop.

They carry their members’ backgrounds in jazz, Cajun and zydeco styles forward with the zip of synthy new wave. In execution, those specifics blend into something that’s weirdly familiar.

They become a less memorable version of hip white bands like Talking Heads, Vampire Weekend or Dirty Projectors. Doe Paoro opens. $15/9 p.m. —JK

DUKE’S BALDWIN AUDITORIUM CIOMPI CONCERT NO. 2 If you were one of the lucky few to see David Lang’s Whisper Opera at Duke early this year, you marveled at soprano Tony Arnold’s ability and intensity at extremely low volume. She returns to the Duke Performances stage with the school’s own Ciompi Quartet for this all-Viennese program. After Schubert’s moody “Rosamunde” quartet and mid-career works by Webern, Arnold joins for Schoenberg’s “String Quartet No. 2” which provides a lyrical setting for several of Stefan George’s poems. $10–$25/7 p.m. —CV DURHAM PERFORMING ARTS CENTER: Dave Rawlings Machine; 7:30 p.m., $27.50–

NRBQ

NRBQ | TUESDAY, NOV. 24 THE POUR HOUSE, RALEIGH—NRBQ might be the quintessential cult band, certainly one of the longest-lived.

The group first came together in Florida in 1967, releasing their debut two years later. While those initials stand for New Rhythm & Blues Quartet, early R&B is only part of the approach. Gleefully unidentifiable, they shift freely between ’50s rock and avant-garde jazz, power pop and a quirky kind of Americana. This band operates entirely within its own universe.

NRBQ’s only original remaining member is keyboard man, driving force and beautiful weirdo Terry Adams, who has always introduced a drastic left turn into his band’s proceedings any time the approach becomes too straightforward for too long. And while Big Al Anderson remains the best-known musician to have held down the guitar spot, he wasn’t even a founder. In fact, fans who lamented Steve Ferguson’s replacement by Anderson eventually came to bemoan Big Al’s departure when bassist Joey Spampinato’s little brother, Johnny, became the new guitarist. These days, it’s Scott Ligon with six strings. Got all that? Good, as the lineup is as full of changes as the music.

Perhaps NRBQ’s closest brush with fame came in 1982, when both Bonnie Raitt and Dave Edmunds covered the band’s offbeat roots-rocker, “Me and the Boys.” But the band has always been too dedicated to its own eccentric muse to care much about mainstream appeal anyway. To wit, even if NRBQ’s latest album, 2014’s Brass Tacks, brims with downright accessible, hook-laden tunes, fear not; live, no matter how many effervescently accessible moments may occur, there’s just one thing you can always expect: whatever it is you’re least expecting. With Robert Kirkland. 9 p.m., $25–$30, 224 S. Blount St., Raleigh, 919-821-1120, www.thepourhousemusichall.com. —Jim Allen $39.50. See page 27.

LINCOLN THEATRE CAPLETON & THE PROPHECY BAND Reggae star Capleton has largely been inactive in the studio in recent years. Still, the veteran vocalist still delivers impassioned performances, leveraging the versatility of The Prophecy Band as he swings between a sweet croon on romantic roots ballads and fiery toasting for rowdy dancehall anthems and crossover raps. Lyrically, Capleton goes heavy on Rastafarian themes, though he’s been

known to slip into some regrettable politically incorrect territory, too. $22–$35/9 p.m. —SG

LOCAL 506 3@3 The latest from Local 506’s new, free Sunday afternoon series matches an Americana veteran with a pair of pop-rock upstarts. Raleigh’s Orchid Sun shades grooving piano pop with lo-fi grit; think Maroon 5 for the indie set. Durham’s Colin Sneed builds a foundation for sneering pop-punk with heavy distortion, needling synths and crisp beats.

Headliner Dexter Romweber

PHOTO COURTESY OF BLUE MOUNTAIN ARTISTS

INDYweek.com

• NOVEMBER 18, 2015 •

should fill his elder statesman role well. With an archivist’s focus, he mines the deepest corners of vintage rock and pop, finding the most timeless elements of rockabilly, surf, blues and country to forge a sound that has made him an enduring cult icon. Free/3 p.m. —BCR

NEPTUNES PARLOUR POINSETTIA Fitting for a band whose members boast long histories, Poinsettia, which formed in December and played its first show in June, seems to have emerged fully formed. The trio’s murky indie rock cribs from legendary ensembles—Polvo’s lazy-comet dissonance, Lync’s gravity, Consonant’s oblique erudition—for a sound that’s invitingly familiar but distinct.

With Toynbee. $5/9 p.m. —PW

MON, NOV 23 CAT’S CRADLE (BACK ROOM) JARED & THE MILL Jared & the Mill’s approach to adult alternative radio-leaning Americana renders them effervescent but indistinct. The Arizona ensemble copies the same rustic pretensions that define The Lumineers, Mumford and Sons and Trampled by Turtles.

Mill has a pleasant voice, but his band’s melodies and arrangements are milquetoast. Air Traffic Controller opens. $15–$17/8 p.m. —PW

POUR HOUSE THE TOASTERS New York ska merchants the Toasters have plied a version of the ska-punk hybrid originally offered by English 2-Tone bands since founding member Robert “Bucket” Hingley fell hard for the English Beat in 1980. The band served to set the stage for the more ska-friendly ’90s, which found acts like Mighty Mighty Bosstones finding fame with the Toasters’ mix as a model. To their credit, the Toasters persevere and keep the bichrome flame alive. With Sound System Seven. $12–$15/8 p.m. —DK

TUE, NOV 24 THE MAYWOOD RIVERS OF NIHIL With August’s Monarchy, Rivers of Nihil push past death metal convention, sometimes going full prog, incorporating post-rock atmospherics and divining big dynamics between blast beats.

The Pennsylvania quintet ar-

36

rives off a nationwide tour with Hate Eternal and Misery Index.

Expect a set honed by almost a month on the road. With Lorelei, Butcher of Rostov and Lesser Life. $8–$10/8:30 p.m. —BCR POUR HOUSE: NRBQ, Robert Kirkland; 9 p.m., $25–$30. See box, this page.

WED, NOV 25 CAT’S CRADLE (BACK ROOM): Mary Johnson Rockers & The Spark; 9 p.m., $8–$10.

LINCOLN THEATRE THE MANTRAS Titling an album Jambands Ruined My Life was surely a tongue-in-cheek move by The Mantras—the Greensboro sextet can’t seem to get enough of the stuff. No matter, as few among its legion of local followers are likely to prioritize studio cuts over live sets, in which guitar noodling and keyboard squiggles dominate aimless tunes. $12.50/9 p.m. —SG

MEYMANDI CONCERT HALL N.C. SYMPHONY: A FROZEN JOURNEY Thanksgiving weekend can mean five days of finding things for the kids to do. The North Carolina Symphony offers an alternative to plugging them in so you can defrost the turkey and clean the house for guests—an afternoon concert of favorites from Frozen, The Polar Express and other holiday fare with a host of costumed sopranos. The symphony partners with the Inter-Faith Food Shuttle’s BackPack Buddies program, accepting Soup-to-Go donations to help feed hungry children. $23/3 p.m. —CV

THE PINHOOK FLUENT, BIGG BRADD This past summer, N.C.-via-Ohio emcee Fluent released Supreme Victory 2, a more courageous outing than the overcrowded potluck strategy of its predecessor. Since, a non-album single with Atlanta rapper Yung L.A., “Getting Paid,” has given Fluent more traction. And while Cardigan Records artist Bigg Bradd is still waiting for something of his to stick, this will be a much-needed opportunity for these two rough-edged rappers—along with The Kush Administration and Just Jess—to invade an area stage that doesn’t see much hip-hop action outside of beat battles and open mics. DJ Hazflo is on the wheels. $7/9:30 p.m. —ET

Galleries

CAPTAIN JAMES & EMMA HOLT WHITE HOUSE: Nov

21-Dec 24: Christmas at Captain White’s, multimedia art by various artists. 213 S Main St, Graham.

INDYPICK

CRAVEN ALLEN

GALLERY: Nov 21-Jan 9: Animal, Vegetable, Mandible, work by Iris Gottlieb. — Nov 21-Jan 9: Moving Pictures/Figure and Forest, work

by Dan Gottlieb. — Sat, Nov 21, 5-7 p.m.: Reception. 1106 1/2 Broad St, Durham. 919-286-4837, www.cravenallengallery.com.

LITTLE ART GALLERY & CRAFT COLLECTION: Nov

21-Dec 31: The Classics, work

by Stephen White. — Sat, Nov 21, 3-5 p.m.: Reception. 432 Daniels St, Raleigh. 919-890-4111, littleartgalleryandcraft.com.

SPECTRE ARTS: Nov 20-Dec 4: Gnaw Dude, new works on paper

by Edward Max Fendley. — Fri, Nov 20, 6 p.m.: Reception. 1004 Morning Glory Ave, Durham. 919213-1441, www.spectrearts.org.

TYNDALL GALLERIES: Nov

19-Dec 31: Lynn Boggess, new landscape paintings. — Sat, Nov 21, 7-9 p.m.: Reception. 201 S Estes Dr, Chapel Hill. 919-9422290, www.tyndallgalleries.com.

ONGOING THE ARTSCENTER: Thru Nov 30: Chatham Artists Guild, multimedia work by various artists.

Free. — Thru Nov 30: Susan Ford, oil paintings. 300-G E Main St, Carrboro. 919-929-2787, www. artscenterlive.org.

ARTSOURCE FINE ART GALLERY: Thru Dec 31:

ArtSource 25th Year Celebration, new works by James P. Kerr. 4351107 The Circle at North Hills St, Raleigh. 919-787-9533, www. artsource-raleigh.com.

ARTSPACE: Thru Nov 21:

Collectors Gala Art Preview. — Thru Nov 28: Memorial Objects, work by Sarah West. — Thru Nov 28: My Favorite Things, work by King Nobuyoshi Godwin. 201 E Davie St, Raleigh. 919-821-2787, www.artspacenc.org.

CARY ARTS CENTER: Thru

Dec 2: Red Ribbon Student Poster Contest. 101 Dry Ave. 919-4694069, www.townofcary.org.

CARY GALLERY OF ARTISTS: Thru Nov 24: Bob Rankin and

Martin Stankus, paintings and pottery. 200 S Academy St #120. 919-462-2035, www. carygalleryofartists.org.

Nature, work by Elizabeth Alexander. 505 S Blount St, Raleigh. 919-757-9533, www. flandersartgallery.com.

more than 50 early printed volumes from UNC’s Rare Book Collection. 201 South Rd, Chapel Hill. www.lib.unc.edu/wilson.

3 Artists, 3 Worlds, works by Sudie Rakusin, Michelle Maynard and Erik Haagensen. 109 E Franklin St, Chapel Hill. 919-636-4135, www. frankisart.com.

TIPPING PAINT GALLERY:

Nov 30: Carolina on My Mind. 200 S Academy St #130, Cary. www. villageartcircle.com.

HORACE WILLIAMS HOUSE:

INDYPICK UNC HANES ART CENTER: Thru Dec 11:

FRANK GALLERY: Thru Dec 6:

Perspectives: An Experimental Dialogue, commissioned multimedia works by 18 artists.

2024 W Main St, Durham. www. danariely.com.

Thru Nov 30: Chieko Murasugi and Cythia Aldrich, paintings and clay sculptures. — Thru Nov 30: The Dancers, ceramic dancers

by Cynthia Aldrich. free. 610 E Rosemary St, Chapel Hill. 919-9427818, chapelhillpreservation.com.

THE COTTON COMPANY:

JOYFUL JEWEL: Thru Nov 30:

CENTER FOR ADVANCED HINDSIGHT: Thru Nov 25:

Thru Dec 6: Richard Tardell. 306 S White St, Wake Forest. 919-5700087, thecottoncompany.net.

INDYPICK DUKE CENTER FOR DOCUMENTARY STUDIES: Thru Feb 27, 2016:

South Side, photographs and writings by Jon Lowenstein. — Thru Feb 28, 2016: Aunties: The Seven Summers of Alevtina and Ludmila, photographs by Nadia Sablin. 1317 W Pettigrew St, Durham. 919-660-3663, www. cdsporch.org.

DUKE RUBENSTEIN LIBRARY: Thru Dec 13:

Dreamers and Dissenters, books, manuscripts, photographs, recordings and artifacts that document human aspirations, including Virginia Woolf’s writing desk. Free. — Thru Nov 30: American Beginnings, maps, texts, and historical documents from the Rubenstein Library, including the Bay Psalm Book. Free. 411 Chapel Drive, Durham. 919-660-5822.

DURHAM ARTS COUNCIL:

Thru Jan 3, 2016: I Am Quixote - Yo Soy Quijote, multimedia work from North Carolina artists exploring themes from Don Quixote de la Mancha. — Thru Nov 28: Folding Light, work by Heather Gordon and Warren Hicks. — Thru Dec 26: Illustrations for the Volcano Book, illustrations from I Built My House on a Volcano by Stacye Leanza. — Fri, Nov 20, 5 p.m.: Reception. 120 Morris St. 919-560-2787, www. durhamarts.org.

ENO GALLERY: Thru Jan 15, 2016: Fine Southern Clay, studio ceramics and sculptural clay by Southern artists. 100 S Churton St, Hillsborough. 919-883-1415, www. enogallery.net.

ERUUF ART GALLERY: Thru

Thru Nov 28: Sweet Potatoes & Beaujolais Nouveau. free. 311 W Martin St, Raleigh. 919-928-5279, www.tippingpaintgallery.com.

Eureka!, new works by UNCChapel Hill MFA in Art alumni, curated by Jina Valentine, in the John and June Allcott Gallery. 101C E Cameron Ave, Chapel Hill. 919962-2015, art.unc.edu.

UNC WILSON SPECIAL COLLECTIONS LIBRARY: Thru

Trees, Shores & More, works by Florence Johnson. 44-A Hillsboro St, Pittsboro. 919-883-2775, www. joyfuljewel.com.

Jan 10, 2016: Chronicles of Empire: Spain in the Americas, featuring

VILLAGE ART CIRCLE: Thru

VISUAL ART EXCHANGE:

Thru Dec 13: Shelter, work by Leila Ehtesham. 309 W Martin St, Raleigh. 919-828-7834, www. visualartexchange.org.

Art Related

ARTSPACE COLLECTERS GALA: Sat, Nov 21, 6:30 p.m.:

Artspace, 201 E Davie St, Raleigh.

NOVEMBER 18, 2015

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919-821-2787, www.artspacenc. org.

THE EL QUIXOTE FESTIVAL:

Thru Apr 23, 2016: art exhibits, performances and more in various locations celebrating Don Quixote.

See website for more details. www.iamquixote.com.

MARY STURGEON: Wed, Nov 18, 3:30 p.m.: discussing ancient Mediterranean art in the Ackland Art Museum. UNC Campus: Bull’s Head Bookshop, 207 South Rd, Chapel Hill. 919-962-5060, store. unc.edu.

MEET THE ARTIST: A CONVERSATION WITH ANNETTE LEMIEUX: Thu, Nov

19, 6 p.m.: free. UNC Campus: Hanes Art Center, 101C E Cameron Ave, Chapel Hill. 919-962-2015, art.unc.edu.

LEE HANSLEY GALLERY: Thru Nov 28: E.C. Langford, nodernist paintings and sculpture. — Thru Nov 28: Swarm, installation by Leah Sobsey. — Thru Nov 28: MidCentury Modern Art, works from the 1950s-1970s by various artists.

225 Glenwood Ave, Raleigh. 919828-7557, leehansleygallery.com.

LITMUS GALLERY: Thru Dec 4: Anything Goes, multimedia works by 40 different artists. 312 W Cabarrus St, Raleigh. 919-5713605, www.litmusgallery.com.

LOCAL COLOR GALLERY:

Thru Nov 28: Fire, Form & Function!, functional and decorative pottery by Mary Beth Owen and jewelry by Virginia Owen. 311 W. Martin Street, Raleigh. 919-819-5995, www. localcoloraleigh.com.

INDYPICK LUMP: Thru Nov 28: We Pain, new works by 33 Philadelphia artists. 505 S Blount St, Raleigh. 919-889-2927, www. teamlump.org.

NATURE ART GALLERY:

Thru Nov 29: The Nature Series, paintings by Ellen Gamble. 11 W Jones St, Raleigh. 919-733-7450 x369, www.naturalsciences.org.

NC CRAFTS GALLERY:

Thru Nov 30: Alicia Stemper, photographs of Carrboro. 212 W Main St, Carrboro. 919-942-4048, www.nccraftsgallery.com.

NCSU DH HILL LIBRARY:

Thru Jan 4, 2016: Life’s Little Dramas: Puppets, Proxies, and Spirits. 2 Broughton Dr, Raleigh.

919-515-3364, www.lib.ncsu.edu.

ROUNDABOUT ART COLLECTIVE: Thru Nov 30:

Dec 10: Images of Outer Bans, photos by Peter Aiken. 4907 Garrett Rd, Durham. 919-4892575, www.eruuf.org.

Color-Vision, abstract paintings

by Leslie Pruneau. 305 Oberlin Rd, Raleigh. 919-747-9495, www. roundaboutartcollective.com.

INDYPICK FLANDERS GALLERY: Thru Dec 8: A

THE SCRAP EXCHANGE:

Changeable and Unpredictable

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exploring the life and legacy of human rights activist Pauli Murray. 2050 Chapel Hill Road, Durham. 919-688-6960, www. scrapexchange.org.

Thru Dec 12: Pauli Murray: Imp, Crusader, Dude, Priest, exhibit

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ARTISTS

visualarts

INDYweek.com

“HENRY” BY HEATHER GORDON AND WARREN HICKS

VISUAL ART

HEATHER GORDON AND WARREN HICKS: FOLDING LIGHT FRIDAY, NOV. 20, DURHAM SUNTRUST GALLERY AT THE DURHAM ART GUILD—If you haven’t yet wrapped yourself in Folding Light, the collaborative installation by Durham artists Heather Gordon and Warren Hicks, tuck into this Third Friday reception before the show closes Nov. 28. It combines photography, video and sculpture into a stark yet humane black-and-white world. The “Folding Portraits” series combines Hicks’ photos of faces with Gordon’s signature origami-like folds, with the patterns determined by the subjects’ personal data, to create portraits that bulge with internal significance. The show also includes “The Shape of Light,” a grid of 60 of Hicks’ painterly photos on aluminum panels; “Moving Light,” a series of video interviews with Durham artists, and other enchanting tricks of the light from two artists whose abstractions of space and information are well matched. 5–7 p.m., free, 120 Morris St., Durham, 919-560-2713, www.durhamartguild.org. —Brian Howe

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NOVEMBER 18, 2015

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The INDY’S GUIDE to ALL THINGS TRIANGLE

DUKE P ER FORMANCES

2 01 5/ 201 6 S E A S O N | M U S I C , T H E AT E R , D A N C E & M O R E .

I N D U R H A M , AT D U K E , A R T M A D E B O L D LY.

| I R R E V E R E N T L Y C O O L H O L I D AY S H O W |

N I C K L O W E ’ S • Q U A L I T Y H O L I D AY R E V U E F E AT U R I N G L O S S T R A I TJ A C K E T S

W E D N E S D AY, D E C E M B E R 2 | R E Y N O L D S I N D U S T R I E S T H E AT E R

| ICONIC AMERICAN SONGWRITER |

ROSANNE CASH THE RIVER & THE THREAD

T H U R S D AY, D E C E M B E R 1 0 | PA G E A U D I TO R I U M

| P R O D I G I O U S LY TA L E N T E D J A Z Z S I N G E R |

C É C I L E M C L O R I N S A LVA N T

S AT U R D AY, D E C E M B E R 1 2 | B A L D W I N A U D I TO R I U M

G E T T I C K E T S : D U K E P E R F O R M A N C E S .O R G | 9 19-68 4 -4 4 4 4

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“DREAM SCENE” BY IRIS GOTTLIEB

2016: Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester and the Creative Mind.

— Thru Jan 31, 2016: Robin Rhode Video Installations. — Thru Jan 17, 2016: The Worlds of M. C. Escher: Nature, Science, and Imagination, approximately 150 woodcuts, lithographs, wood engravings, and mezzotints, as well as numerous drawings, watercolors, woodblocks, and lithographic stones never before exhibited.

— Thru Jan 17, 2016: The Worlds of M.C. Escher: Nature, Science, and Imagination. 2110 Blue Ridge Rd, Raleigh. Info 919-839-6262, tickets 919-715-5923, www. ncartmuseum.org.

NC MUSEUM OF HISTORY:

Thru Jun 19, 2016: Treasures of Carolina: Stories from the State Archives, public records and private archival materials from the state archives. — Thru Feb 28, 2016: Hey America!: Eastern North Carolina and the Birth of Funk. — Thru Jul 10, 2016: North Carolina’s Favorite Son: Billy Graham and His Remarkable Journey of Faith. — Sat, Nov 21, 11 a.m.-4 p.m.: American Indian Heritage Celebration, music, dance, arts, storytelling, cultural presentations, hands-on activities and food, with members of every state-recognized tribe and organization. 5 E Edenton St, Raleigh. 919-807-7900, www. ncmuseumofhistory.org.

performance Comedy

THE ARTSCENTER: Sat, Nov

“TROPICAL FOREST” BY DAN GOTTLIEB Craven Allen Gallery hosts simultaneous shows by a father and daughter Nov. 21–Jan. 9. Dan Gottlieb, director of planning at the North Carolina Museum of Art, shows mixed-media works in Moving Pictures/ Figure and Forest. Iris Gottlieb shows illustrations in Animal, Vegetable, Mandible. See them both at the opening reception Saturday, Nov. 21, from 5 to 7 p.m. 1106 1/2 Broad St., Durham, 919-286-4837, www.cravenallengallery.com.

MEETINGS AND REMARKABLE JOURNEYS:

Thru Nov 30: exhibit exploring the life, work and legacy of playwright and activist Amiri Baraka. UNC Campus: Sonja Haynes Stone Center, 150 South Rd, Chapel Hill. 919-962-9001, www. sonjahaynesstonectr.unc.edu.

WENDY MUSSER: PAINTING EXPRESSIVE LANDSCAPES:

Sat, Nov 21, 10 a.m.: discussing plein air painting techniques. NC Botanical Garden, 100 Old Mason Farm Rd, Chapel Hill. 919-9620522, ncbg.unc.edu.

Museums

ACKLAND ART MUSEUM:

Thru Jan 3, 2016: Testing Testing, survey of paintings and sculpture

since 1960. 101 S Columbia St, Chapel Hill. 919-843-1611, www. ackland.org.

CAM RALEIGH: Thru Jan 3, 2016: The Imaginary Architecture of Love, mural by Sarah Cain.

409 W Martin St. 919-261-5920, camraleigh.org.

NASHER MUSEUM OF ART:

Thru Sep 18, 2016: The New Galleries: A Collection Come to Light. — Thru Feb 28, 2016: Reality of My Surroundings: The Contemporary Collection. — Thru Jan 10, 2016: Richard Mosse: The Enclave. — Thursdays, 5-9 p.m.: Free Thursday Nights, Admission is free to all. 2001 Campus Dr, Durham. 919-684-5135, nasher. duke.edu.

NC MUSEUM OF ART: Thru Mar 20, 2016: Chisel and Forge: Works by Peter Oakley and Elizabeth Brim. — Thru Jan 17,

21, 6 p.m.: Transactors Improv: For Families!. $6–$10. -- Third Saturdays, 8:30 p.m.: The Chuckle & Chortle Comedy Show, Local stand-up comics bring the laughs. $7. 300-G E Main St, Carrboro.

919-929-2787, www.artscenterlive. org.

GOODNIGHTS COMEDY CLUB / THE GRILLE AT GOODNIGHTS: Wed, Nov 18,

8 p.m.: The Sinful SIx. $12–$20.

-- Thu, Nov 19, 8 p.m., Fri, Nov 20, 7:30 & 10 p.m., Sat, Nov 21, 7:30 & 10 p.m. & Sun, Nov 22, 7 p.m.: Aries Spears. $18–$35.

-- Saturdays, 10:30 p.m.: Anything

•

Goes Late Show. free. 861 W Morgan St, Raleigh. 919-828-5233, www.goodnightscomedy.com.

KINGS: Third Fridays, 8-9:30

p.m.: The Dangling Loafer. $5.00. https://www.facebook.com/ TheDanglingLoafer. 14 W Martin St, Raleigh. 919-833-1091, www. kingsbarcade.com.

LLOYD’S LOUNGE: Second & Fourth Wednesdays, 9 p.m.: Out & Out Comedy Open Mic, With host B.I.S.H.O.P. Omega. 919-4107575, TAO@JustAskTruitt.com. 704 Rigsbee Ave, Durham.

MOTORCO MUSIC HALL:

Sun, Nov 22, 9 p.m.: Myq Kaplan. $12–$15. 723 Rigsbee Ave, Durham. 919-901-0875, www. motorcomusic.com.

THE THRILL AT HECTOR’S:

Third Fridays, 9 p.m.: Funny Business Live, Pro comedy series. $5-8. www.funnybusinesslive.com.

157 E Rosemary St, Chapel Hill.

919-960-5145.

TIR NA NOG IRISH PUB & RESTAURANT: Mondays, 8:30

p.m.: Cure for the Mondays, Weekly comedy night. 218 S Blount St, Raleigh. 919-833-7795, www.tnnirishpub.com.

TOOTIE’S: Saturdays, 7:30 p.m.: ComedyMongers Open Mic. $5, free for comedians. 704 Rigsbee Ave, Durham. 984-439-2328.

NOVEMBER 18, 2015

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Dance

Third Fridays, 10 p.m.: Salsa lessons, then dancing to salsa, merengue, bachata, rumba, reggaeton & more. 4020 Lounge, 4020 Chapel Hill Blvd, Durham. $5-10. cimarron.eventbrite.com.

DURHAM DANCE WAVE:

Mondays, 7:30-9 p.m.: $7. www. durhamdancewave.com. The Murphey School at the Shared Visions Retreat Center, 3717 Murphy School Rd, Durham. 919616-2190, www.sharedvisions.org.

SUNDAY AFTERNOON SALSA: Second & Fourth

Sundays, 3:30-6:15 p.m.: $6–$10.

919-494-2300, wesleyboz@ musicanddance.com. Raleigh Elks Lodge, 5538 Leadmine Rd.

SUNDAY SALSA SOCIAL:

Sundays, 6:30-9:30 p.m.: Every Sunday social featuring mostly Salsa with sides of Bachata, Merengue, Cha Cha, and Kizomba.

Lesson at 6:30 for beginners plus sometimes intermediate. DJ Dance at 7. $6. www.dancegumbo.com.

Triangle Dance Studio, 2603 S Miami Blvd, Durham.

TRIANGLE FOLK DANCERS: Wednesdays, 7:30-10 p.m.: Recreational international folk dancing. Lesson at 7:45 p.m.. $3.

20, 8 p.m.: Kier. $13-15. 919-4622051, thecarytheater.com. 122 E Chatham St.

COMEDYWORX THEATRE:

Fridays, 8 p.m. & Saturdays, 4 & 8 p.m.: ComedyWorx Improv Show, 2 teams of improv comedians earn points by making the audience laugh. $6-12. -- Fridays, 10 p.m. & Saturdays, 10 p.m.: The Harry Show, Ages 18+. Improv host leads late-night revelers through potentially risque games, with audience volunteers brought onstage to join in. $10. 431 Peace St, Raleigh. 919-829-0822, comedyworx.com.

DSI COMEDY THEATER:

Fridays, 10 p.m.: Mister Diplomat.

Free. -- Fridays, 11 p.m.: The Jam. free. -- Saturdays, 10 p.m.: Pork, 5 NC comics perform. Free. 462 W Franklin St, Chapel Hill. 919-3388150, www.dsicomedytheater. com.

FLEX NIGHTCLUB: Thursdays,

midnite: Trailer Park Prize Night, comedy drag show with gag prize giveaways. 2 S West St, Raleigh.

919-832-8855, www.flex-club.com.

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CIMARRON LATIN NIGHT:

THE CARY THEATER: Fri, Nov

PHOTO COURTESY OF CAROLINA BALLET

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PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE ARTISTS

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BEETHOVEN: SYMPHONY NO. 9

DANCE | BEETHOVEN: SYMPHONY NO. 9 THURSDAY, NOV. 19–SUNDAY, NOV. 22, RALEIGH RALEIGH MEMORIAL AUDITORIUM—Before its inevitable December run of The Nutcracker, here’s something more substantial from Carolina Ballet: revivals of two significant works by artistic director Robert Weiss. His 2012 staging of his choreography for Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 culminates in a tour de force visual translation of the famous “Ode to Joy.” It’s paired with his 2002 interpretation of Igor Stravinsky’s Petruschka, an update that’s not as dark as original choreographer Michel Fokine’s take. In it, three clowns vie for the affections of the matchless ballerina, Columbine, in what Weiss terms “a circus of the mind.” 8 p.m. Thurs.–Sat.; 2 p.m. Sat.–Sun., $25–$70, 2 E. South St., Raleigh, 919-719-0900, www.carolinaballet.com. —Byron Woods

Beth El Synagogue, 1004 Watts St, Durham. 919-682-1238, www. betheldurham.org.

TRIANGLE SINGLES DANCE CLUB: Fri, Nov 20, 8 p.m. & Sat,

Nov 28: Alcohol-free 50+ singles social club. $5–$8. Northbrook Country Club, 4905 North Hills Dr, Raleigh.

PERFORMANCE INDYPICK CAROLINA BALLET: BEETHOVEN’S 9TH:

Thu, Nov 19, 8 p.m., Fri, Nov 20, 8 p.m., Sat, Nov 21, 2 & 8 p.m. & Sun, Nov 22, 2 p.m.: $30–$68.

Memorial Auditorium, 2 E South St, Raleigh. 919-996-8700, www. dukeenergycenterraleigh.com. See box, p. 39.

NOVEMBER DANCES 2015: Fri, Nov 20, 7:30 INDYPICK

p.m. & Sat, Nov 21, 7:30 p.m.: new ballet, modern, African Dance, and flamenco works by Duke Dance faculty Tyler Walters, Andrea E. Woods Valdés, Ava LaVonne Vinesett, Carlota Santana, and advanced choreography students. $7–$17. Duke Campus: Reynolds Industries Theater, Bryan Center, West Campus, Durham.

books

Theater

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF: Fri, Nov 20, 7:30 p.m., Sat, Nov 21, 7:30 p.m. & Sun, Nov 22, 5 p.m.: $10–$12. Unitarian Universalist Community Church, 106 Purefoy Rd, Chapel Hill. 919-942-2050, www.c3huu.org.

Readings & Signing

ARI BERMAN: Fri, Nov 20, 6 p.m.: with Give Us the Ballot.

Regulator Bookshop, 720 Ninth St, Durham. 919-286-2700, www. regulatorbookshop.com.

ONGOING INDYPICK PETER AND THE STARCATCHER: Tuesdays-

Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Thru Dec 12: $15–$44. UNC Campus: Paul Green Theatre, 120 Country Club Rd, Chapel Hill. 919-962-7529, playmakersrep.org.

INDYPICK

INDYPICK BILL NYE: Fri, Nov 20, 6:15 p.m.: with Unstoppable.

Fearrington Barn, 2000 Fearrington Village Center, Pittsboro. www. fearrington.com. See box, p. 40.

ANON(YMOUS):

DELTA AUTHORS ON TOUR:

Thru Nov 22: NCSU Campus: Titmus Theatre, 2241 E Dunn Ave, Raleigh.

Sat, Nov 21, 2-5 p.m.: collaborative project with a coalition of area alumnae chapters of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. Western Wake Alumnae hosts a panel of nine authors who will discuss their books. Martin Gifted and Talented Magnet Middle School, 1701 Ridge Road, Raleigh. 919-881-1440.

TITUS ANDRONICUS: Thru Nov 21: Common Ground Theatre, 4815-B Hillsborough Rd, Durham.

919-384-7817, cgtheatre.com.

A YEAR WITH FROG AND TOAD: Wed, Nov 18, 10 a.m. &

12:30 p.m.: $11–$17. Raleigh Little Theatre, 301 Pogue St. Office 919821-4579, Tickets 919-821-3111, www.raleighlittletheatre.org.

GEORGE SINGLETON: Thu, Nov 19, 7-8 p.m.: with short story collection Calloustown. free.

Flyleaf Books, 752 Martin Luther King Jr Blvd, Chapel Hill. 919-9427373, www.flyleafbooks.com.

THE MURPHEY SCHOOL RADIO SHOW

PERFORMANCE

THE MURPHEY SCHOOL RADIO SHOW SATURDAY, NOV. 21, DURHAM THE MURPHEY SCHOOL AT THE SHARED VISIONS RETREAT CENTER—Like a pro bono Prairie Home Companion, the Murphey School Radio Show is a biannual variety show in the style of an oldtime radio program. It unites musical, literary and other types of creative minds to benefit local charities with songs, stories, jokes and more. Chapel Hill’s Daniel Wallace, the charming and witty author of Big Fish, joins this year’s cast, which also includes trombonist Danny Grewen, female vocal group Stella and UNC-TV host Deborah Holt Noel. The beneficiaries are Crayons 2 Calculators, which collects supplies for children in Durham Public Schools, and Our Children’s Place, which supports children whose parents are incarcerated. 3 and 7 p.m., $35–$50, 3717 Murphey School Road, Durham, 919-616-2190, www.murpheyschoolradio.net —Allison Hussey

PHOTO COURTESY OF MURPHEY SCHOOL RADIO SHOW

HARRIET MCDOUGAL, MARIA SIMONS AND ALAN ROMANCZUK: Sat, Nov 21,

4 p.m.: with The Wheel of Time Companion: The People, Places and History of the Bestselling Series. Quail Ridge Books & Music, 3522 Wade Ave, Raleigh. 919-8281588, www.quailridgebooks.com.

HEATHER BOWLAN, J. SCOTT BROWNLEE, TYREE DAYE AND MATTHEW WIMBERLEY: Mon, Nov 23, 7

p.m.: reading poetry. Quail Ridge Books & Music, 3522 Wade Ave, Raleigh. 919-828-1588, www. quailridgebooks.com.

KIMBERLY KYSER: Sat, Nov

21, 11 am: discussing her new etiquette book. McIntyre’s Books, 2000 Fearrington Village Center, Pittsboro. 919-542-3030, www. mcintyresbooks.com.

LEON CAPETANOS: Thu, Nov

19, 7 p.m.: with novel The Time Box. Quail Ridge Books & Music, 3522 Wade Ave, Raleigh. 919-8281588, www.quailridgebooks.com.

INDYPICK LITTLE CORNER READING SERIES: BHANU KAPIL AND PAUL SINGLETON III: Sat, Nov 21, 8-10 p.m.: free.

805-470-0758, jmq3@duke.edu, www.theinvisiblebear.com. The Shed Jazz Club, 807 E Main St, #130, Durham. 732-570-2935.

NICOLE SARROCCO: Sun, Nov

22, 2 p.m.: with Lit by Lightning: An Occasionally True Account of One Girl’s Dust-ups with Ghosts, Electricity, and Granny’s Ashes.

Quail Ridge Books & Music, 3522 Wade Ave, Raleigh. 919-828-1588, www.quailridgebooks.com.

SUE GRAFTON: Wed, Nov 18, 7 p.m.: with X: A Kinsey Millhone Novel. Quail Ridge Books & Music, 3522 Wade Ave, Raleigh. 919-8281588, www.quailridgebooks.com.

TONY REEVY AND PABLO DELANO: Tue, Nov 24, 7 p.m.:

with The Railroad Photography of Jack Delano. Regulator Bookshop, 720 Ninth St, Durham. 919-2862700, www.regulatorbookshop. com.

Literary Related

CITY SOUL CAFE POETRY & SPOKEN WORD OPEN MIC:

Wednesdays, 8-10 p.m.: Poets, vocalists, musicians & lyricists welcome. All performances a cappella or acoustic. $5. www. citysoulcafe.splashthat.com.

Smokin Grooves Bar & Grill, 2253 New Hope Church Rd, Raleigh.

CURRYBLOSSOM CONVERSATIONS: Third

Thursdays, 6-8 p.m.: Sacrificial Poets host an open mic event for works of music, poetry or anything in-between. The aim is a relaxing & enjoyable night out where you can eat, drink & connect through creativity. Vimala’s Curryblossom Cafe, 431 W Franklin St, Chapel Hill. 919-929-3833, www. curryblossom.com.

JAMBALAYA SOUL SLAM: Sat, Nov 21, 8 p.m.: $7. Hayti Heritage Center, 804 Old Fayetteville St, Durham. 919-683-1709, www. hayti.org.

MEET THE AUTHOR TEA: CHARLES D. THOMPSON, JR.: Thu, Nov 19, 3:30-5 p.m.:

with Border Odyssey: Travels Along the U.S.-Mexico Divide.

Free. Chapel Hill Public Library, 100 Library Dr. 919-969-2028, chapelhillpubliclibrary.org.

RADICAL READERS: Last Tuesdays: Durham People’s Alliance book group meets at night to discuss books. RSVP for location, time & car pool. 682-7777.

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NOVEMBER 18, 2015

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SIGNING | BILL NYE FRIDAY, NOV. 20, PITTSBORO THE BARN AT FEARRINGTON—It’s been more than 20 years since Bill Nye hit American TV screens with his funny, sharp science program for pre-teens. Though the show Bill Nye the Science Guy only stayed on the air for five years, the man who’ll forever be known by that title has stuck around in syndication and classrooms for much longer, leaving a lasting impression on Millennials.

These days, Nye’s biggest cause is climate change—he appears regularly as a talking head on cable programs in vehement disagreement with the deniers. His new book, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World, carries on his mission to promote activism, protect the planet and encourage curiosity and learning. The purchase of Unstoppable from McIntyre’s Books admits two people to the talk and signing. 6:30 p.m., $28.81 (price of book), 2000 Fearrington Village Center, Pittsboro, 919-542-3030, www.fearrington.com. —Allison Hussey

sports Spectator

HURRICANES VS. KINGS:

Sun, Nov 22, 1 p.m.: PNC Arena, 1400 Edwards Mill Rd, Raleigh. Office 919-861-2300, Tickets 1-800-745-3000, www. thepncarena.com.

HURRICANES VS. MAPLE LEAFS: Fri, Nov 20, 7 p.m.: PNC

Arena, 1400 Edwards Mill Rd, Raleigh. Office 919-861-2300, Tickets 1-800-745-3000, www. thepncarena.com.

HURRICANES VS. OILERS: Wed, Nov 25, 7 p.m.: PNC Arena, 1400 Edwards Mill Rd, Raleigh. Office 919-861-2300, Tickets 1-800-745-3000, www. thepncarena.com.

MIGUEL COTTO VS. CANELO ALVAREZ: Sat, Nov 21, 9 p.m.: Crossroads 20, 501 Caitboo Ave, Cary. 919-676-3456.

N.C. STATE VS. IUPUI: Wed, Nov 18, 7 p.m.: PNC Arena, 1400 Edwards Mill Rd, Raleigh. Office 919-861-2300, Tickets 1-800-7453000, www.thepncarena.com.

fi

Specia

FRAME BY 18, 6-8 p.m four Afghan as they nav landscape a Taliban, foll co-director free. UNC C 211 S Colum ELLIS: We short docum the Ellis Isla Hospital. RS camraleigh.

Raleigh, 409 261-5920, c INSIDE OU p.m.: $2–$5 Center, 237 919-249-11 org.

VOICES O Fri, Nov 20, and under f of History, 5 Raleigh. 919 ncmuseum CITIZEN K 7:30 p.m.: $ of Art, 2110 OAKS & SPOKES Raleigh. Info CRANKSGIVING: A FOOD tickets 919DRIVE BIKE RIDE: Sun, Nov 22, ncartmuseu 1-4:30 p.m. Crank Arm Brewing Co, 319 W Davie St, Raleigh. www. CARRBOR Sat, Nov 21 crankarmbrewing.com.

Sun, Nov 22 RIVER RUN CLUB: Thursdays, $15–$20. T 6:45 p.m.: The Hop Yard, 1141 FallsE Main St, C River Ave, Raleigh. 919-971-0631, 2787, www www.thehopyardnc.com/.

JACKSON TEAM ON DRAFT BIKE FILM FEST RIDE: Wednesdays, 6 p.m.: Ride Fri, Nov 20, sponsored by New Belgium. To 21, 10 am: join, you should be able to hold winning nat a 15 mph pace for 18 miles, and films from t have your own helmet, water, Museum of pump and spare tube. The Glass W Jones St, Jug, 5410 Hwy 55, Durham. 919- 7450, www

Participatory

813-0135.

WEDNESDAY BIKE RIDE:

Wednesdays, 6 p.m.: Crank Arm Brewing Co, 319 W Davie St, Raleigh. www.crankarmbrewing. com.

WEST END RUN CLUB:

Film

Our rating sy Tuesdays, 6 p.m.: DSI Comedy five stars. Si Theater, 462 W Franklin St, Brian Howe Chapel Hill. 919-338-8150, www. (LJ), Kathy J dsicomedytheater.com.

Lindsey (CD (GM), Neil M Vu (RV).

INDYweek.com

film Special Showings

FRAME BY FRAME: Wed, Nov 18, 6-8 p.m.: documentary about four Afghan photojournalists as they navigate a new media landscape after the fall of the Taliban, followed by a Q&A with co-director Alexandria Bombach. free. UNC Campus: Carroll Hall, 211 S Columbia St, Chapel Hill.

ELLIS: Wed, Nov 18, 7 p.m.: short documentary about the Ellis Island Immigrant Hospital. RSVP to melissa.roth@ camraleigh.org. free. CAM Raleigh, 409 W Martin St. 919261-5920, camraleigh.org.

INSIDE OUT: Thu, Nov 19, 6 p.m.: $2–$5. Halle Cultural Arts Center, 237 N Salem St, Apex.

919-249-1120, www.thehalle. org.

VOICES OF THE LUMBEE: Fri, Nov 20, 7 p.m.: $15, 12 and under free. NC Museum of History, 5 E Edenton St, Raleigh. 919-807-7900, www. ncmuseumofhistory.org.

CITIZEN KANE: Fri, Nov 20, 7:30 p.m.: $5–$7. NC Museum of Art, 2110 Blue Ridge Rd, Raleigh. Info 919-839-6262, tickets 919-715-5923, www. ncartmuseum.org.

CARRBORO FILM FESTIVAL: Sat, Nov 21, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. & Sun, Nov 22, 12:45-7:30 p.m.: $15–$20. The ArtsCenter, 300-G E Main St, Carrboro. 919-9292787, www.artscenterlive.org.

JACKSON HOLE WILDLIFE FILM FESTIVAL WINNERS: Fri, Nov 20, 7 p.m. & Sat, Nov 21, 10 am: screenings of awardwinning nature and conservation films from this year’s festival. NC Museum of Natural Sciences, 11 W Jones St, Raleigh. 919-7337450, www.naturalsciences.org.

Film Capsules

Our rating system uses one to five stars. Signed reviews are by Brian Howe (BH), Laura Jaramillo (LJ), Kathy Justice (KJ), Craig D. Lindsey (CDL), Glenn McDonald (GM), Neil Morris (NM) and Ryan Vu (RV).

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NOVEMBER 18, 2015

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FILM

NO HAND KING

THURSDAY, NOV. 19, RALEIGH RIALTO THEATRE—Rodney Hines, better known as the No Hand King, has become one of Raleigh’s contemporary folk heroes. His nickname comes from his habit—or ● COUPLES FREE BEFORE 10PM! way of life, really—of riding long ● $5 FIRE SHOTS!!! $7 ANGRY BALL BOILERMKERS!!! wheelies around the city with two ● 2 FOR $40 PRIVATE DANCES EVERY HOUR ON THE HOUR! huge American flags waving proudly from the back of his bike. Though ● $6 LUNCH SPECIAL & NO COVER BEFORE 8PM he makes it look easy, his cycling To advertise or feature a pet for adoption, feats are hardly casual: Last summer, capitalcabaret.com • 919.206.4040 • 6713rgierisch@indyweek.com Mt Herman Rd • Morrisville (Located in Brier Creek, adjacent to RDU) please contact he went so far as to attempt a wheelie for a full 50-mile stretch of the Outer Banks. Mid-June heat kept him from completing - $6 Lunch & Nowas Cover Before 8pm it with 19 miles left. Raleigh filmmaker PatrickSpecial Shanahan there to film the attempt, and his documentary also explores Hines’ journey to becoming the No Hand King. 6, 7:30 and 9 To advertise or feature a pet p.m., $10, 1620 Glenwood Ave., Raleigh, 919-856-8683, for adoption, please contact www.ambassadorcinemas.com. —Allison Hussey

rgierisch@indyweek.com

Opening

BROOKLYN—Saoirse Ronan stars in this story of a young Irish immigrant landing in Brooklyn in the 1950s, based on the 2009 novel

by Colm Tóibín. Rated PG-13.

THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY – PART 2—The dystopian adventures of Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) come to an end in this conclusion of the film adaptations of the wildly popular YA franchise. Rated PG-13.

THE NIGHT BEFORE—Lifelong buddies Ethan (Joseph GordonLevitt), Isaac (Seth Rogen) and Chris (Anthony Mackie) go off on goofy Christmas Eve escapades in New York in search of the ultimate Christmas party. Rated R.  1/2 ROOM—Emma Donoghue and Lenny Abrahamson’s film, adapted from Donoghue’s novel, is a cathartic exploration of the trauma at the heart of the love between mother and child. The horrific premise— that young mother Joy Newsome (Brie Larson) and her son, Jack (Jacob Tremblay), are prisoners in a psychopath’s shed—is kept in the background, intensifying uncomfortable emotions intrinsic to parenting and early childhood.

Daringly, the film highlights how trauma can be deepened through a parent’s efforts to protect her child. After letting Jack believe the room is all there is, Joy must shatter his illusions all at once.

The pair’s performances in these wrenching sequences deserve their Oscar buzz. Danny Cohen’s cinematography ties us to Jack’s point of view via tight closeups, restricting spatial detail.

This works well for scenes of suspense and tragedy. Underlying

everything is the story of Austria’s Elisabeth Fritzl, who was held captive by her father in his cellar for 24 years. The film is inspired by, not based on, the Fritzl story, but a few threads from the source material beg to be tied. Keeping the captor incidental to the plot avoids cliché at the cost of making his behavior seem inconsistent: If he’s such a monster, why does he obey Joy’s demand that he never even see his son? We don’t know because Jack can’t. Rated R. —RV ROSENWALD—Aviva Kemper’s documentary about Julius Rosenwald tracks the Chicago philanthropist’s social justice and community-building efforts in the first half of the 20th century.

Rated R. SPOTLIGHT—This based-on-atrue-story drama follows the staff of the Boston Globe in the early 2000s as it uncovered sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

Rated R.

Current Releases

 1/2 BRIDGE OF SPIES—In Steven Spielberg’s true-story spy film, co-written by Ethan and Joel Coen, Berlin’s Glienicke Bridge is the site of the 1962 prisoner trade involving captured American spy-plane pilot Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell) and convicted Soviet spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance). At first, it plays out like To Kill a Mockingbird, with attorney James Donovan (Tom Hanks) as a Cold War Atticus Finch, defending the vilified Abel before later negotiating the prisoner swap. Donovan is righteous, droll and likable. In other words, he’s Tom Hanks.

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Rylance shapes a reed-thin role into an award-worthy performance. Seeing Germans being gunned down trying to scale the Berlin Wall indicts today’s immigration debates, and the legal plight of Abel alludes to our current treatment of “enemy combatants.” The U-2 overflights of yesterday are the drones of today. This modern relevance is enhanced by grand, sometimes sentimental filmmaking. That this will be regarded as minor Spielberg testifies to his enduring talent. Rated PG-13. —NM  THE INTERN—Nancy Meyers controls every aspect of the manicured luxury in her films, down to personally filling each table with flowers. It’s easy to see Meyers in Jules Ostin (Anne Hathaway), who is so committed to her company that she travels to its shipping warehouse to ensure the tissue paper in packages is folded just so. Ben Whittaker (Robert De Niro), a genial widower searching for meaning in life, becomes Jules’ intern at her Brooklyn fashion startup. Mutual life lessons ensue, leavened with tiny blips of comedy and drama. Gentle Ben wins over spiky Jules, and their budding friendship balances the schmaltzy humor (the eldery lack tech skills!) clogging the script. There is a bigger story about working mothers and aging under the vanilla-and-cashmere surface, but if you seek Meyers’ particular brand of comfort rather than complexity, the film satisfies completely. Rated PG-13. —KJ  1/2 THE MARTIAN—Director Ridley Scott’s latest is one nerdy-ass science fiction movie—in a good way. In a recognizable near future, NASA sends interplanetary space ships on regular trips to Mars.

Astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is separated, presumed dead and left behind by his crew.

But he survives, and most of the movie documents his ingenuity in gathering and creating what he needs to stay alive. As you get swept up in the story, it’s easy to forget how amazing Scott’s visuals are—he has created a new world onscreen. The film has a few weak spots: Some dodgy cloakand-dagger elements toward the end strain credulity. But overall, the film delivers what it should.

A thinking person’s big-budget sci-fi movie, it’s talky and intelligent. The filmmakers worked with NASA to make the science as accurate as possible. The story is compelling, the visuals are spectacular and the movie even manages to make math exhilarating. Rated PG-13. —GM  SICARIO—In Denis Villeneuve’s bleak appraisal of the modern border war on drugs, FBI

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agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) is recruited by an enigmatic spook, Matt (Josh Brolin), to a black ops unit with the mandate to “dramatically overreact” to drug smuggling from Mexico. The hit man referred to in the film’s Spanish title is Alejandro, Matt’s spear tip, a cold-blooded crusader whose hatred of drug lords and mysterious past are shrouded behind the world-weary eyes of Benicio Del Toro. The cast is uniformly convincing as they careen through white-knuckle set pieces, but the real star is Roger Deakins’ indomitable cinematography. The film loses its bearings in the last act, when Alejandro goes full-on Anton Chigurh, but overall, this taut tableau is the haunting spawn of No Country for Old Men and Zero Dark Thirty.

Rather than the root causes of the drug war, we see only its cruel effects. When Kate naively asks Alejandro how cartels are organized, he sighs, “You’re asking me how a watch works. For now, just keep your eye on the time.”

Rated R. —NM  SPECTRE—Until now, Ernst Stavro Blofeld and the rest of the SPECTRE global crime syndicate hadn’t appeared in a James Bond film since 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever. But in 2013, after decades of rights-wrangling, MGM and the estate of film producer Kevin McClory finally reached a legal settlement, allowing Bond’s original infamous foes to return to the franchise. The 24th Bond film is overeager to reintegrate its birthright, shoehorning it into the narrative reboot that began with Daniel Craig’s 007 and temporarily rejuvenated the franchise.

But the slapdash Spectre is a nostalgic deviation that rolls back the Craig films from a reinvention to a mere rehash. A power struggle threatens to render the 00 section obsolete. With the help of Q (Ben Whishaw) and Moneypenny (Naomie Harris), Bond (Craig) goes rogue (again) on a globe-trotting search for the mastermind behind the worldwide tentacles of criminal mayhem dogging him and killing those close to him. A few moments prove memorable: An extended tracking shot through Mexico’s Day of the Dead festivities before the opening credits, a train-car brawl between Bond and henchman du jour Mr. Hinx (Dave Bautista). Otherwise, the action scenes fall flat despite this reportedly being among the most expensive movies ever produced.

It does have a basic appeal for aficionados like me, with its copious callbacks to Bond lore, good and bad, but this distended 140-minute theme-park ride doesn’t leave us shaken or stirred.

NOVEMBER 18, 2015

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Rated PG-13. —NM  1/2 STEVE JOBS—This portrait of the Apple guru is essentially a three-act opera.

Each part is set at different times, inside different California concert halls, with composer Daniel Pemberton’s soundtrack accompanied by dollops of Bob Dylan and indie rock. The same characters rotate through each act, and at one point, Jobs (a mesmerizing Michael Fassbender) likens them to an orchestra he conducts. But instead of being sung, the lyrics are set in screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s distinctive cadence.

Eschewing the standard cradle-tograve biopic, Sorkin and director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire) tailor their narrative around Jobs backstage before three of his famously hyped product launches, each emblematic of his personal and professional arc. The shared narrative thread running through each act is Jobs’ relationship with his daughter, Lisa. The film never cracks Jobs’ veneer to dissect the origins of his genius or madness—a few fleeting references in Act 3 to his adopted childhood are the closest it comes. Steve Jobs doesn’t comprehend Steve Jobs—maybe no one ever did. But through a stylized marriage of writing, directing and acting, we feel like we come to know the man who put a thousand songs in our pocket. Rated R. —NM  SUFFRAGETTE—Those expecting a proper period piece will be sorely disappointed by this restless, angry drama, which sometimes plays out like a violent political thriller. Set in 1912 London and based on historical events, the film stars Carey Mulligan as Maud Watts, a desperately poor laundry worker in 1912 gradually radicalized by veteran women’s suffrage activists. “We break windows, we burn things,” Maud says.

“Because war is the only language men understand.” The gritty, ground-level story moves with the verve and velocity of a spy movie, and director Sarah Gavron makes bold choices throughout. It’s a bit of a stealth move, actually: Suffragette is a provocative political drama dressed as a British prestige picture. Rated PG-13. —GM

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